OpenStreetMap
First stop, Cercedilla
The Spanish government has decided to fully subsidise the regional train services around major Spanish cities for the rest of the year, to try and encourage people to use public transport more. Now I don’t use Madrid’s Cercanias services very often, because I work mostly from home, but I decided to get my free ticket and explore the region a bit more. Then it occurred to me that I could also take advantage of the offer to do a bit of OSM mapping in different places.
So yesterday I got on the train and headed to Cercedilla, sitting at the foot of Madrid’s mountains. It’s a station I have been to many times, but always to start a hike - you can walk straight out of the station and onto a trail that takes you up to those mountains. This time I headed for the nearby village, gathering addresses and points of interest as I went.
I was giving a test run to the Every Door application, presented by Ilya Zverev at this year’s State of the Map event in Florence. It worked very well for capturing the points of interest, the address and building interface was a little trickier to understand - but I liked it and will use it again. I need to check whether I can configure it a bit more so that I don’t need to add so much to the data later at home. But I can stop being the mapper with the old Garmin GPS for a while.
More OSM away days around Madrid will come, the free ticket lasts until the end of the year!
Discussion
Comment from mcliquid on 11 September 2022 at 13:02
I bet you’ll love StreetComplete for that too! Whereas I’ve already noticed on our trains in Germany & Austria that the GPS most of the time doesn’t work at all, because the windows are covered with a metal layer for heat protection reasons, which blocks not only the heat of the sun but also the GPS.
Comment from Graeme Herbert on 13 September 2022 at 08:55
I’ve been testing StreetComplete too, although I think it is better for places where there is already a lot of data. Where a lot of new data can still be added I think Every Door is more useful. I didn’t collect data from the train, by the way - I just used the train to get to where I wanted to start!