Our regular imports of data from the openstreetmap.org (OSM) project now includes ways that are marked as ferry crossings. For the UK, this amounts to around 250 links.
Here’s an example where the quietest route uses the ferry, but the fastest goes a longer way round on the roads: http://www.cyclestreets.net/journey/70755/
The hours of operation and the crossing times of the ferries are not included, and so the routes are indicative, and come with a note advising to check departure times. Over time, as more information about these crossings is included in OSM we shall extend this feature in response to feedback.
Following feedback from a CycleStreets user we were able to add scales to all the scrollable maps on our website – within an hour of receiving the request. We can’t always respond that quickly, but the internal system we have in place for handling routing feedback is helping us address the volume of comments and prioritise development to improve the quality of the suggested routes.
The photos-en-route system (described in a recent blog post) that we revived last month seems to have stimulated more contributions of photos of cycleways and cycle parking from all around the country. It takes a couple of days for recently contributed photos to start appearing in the route listings because that is part of our almost daily refresh cycle. There are plans to make this more immediate, and if you think we should prioritise that work let us know.
One thought to “Ferry Crossings and more”
Excellent. I have just added a wikipedia link to the ferry in question to an article which provides details of times and costs, possibly in a later CycleStreets version you can provide such links. There is also a link to an article about regional cycle route 41 which is used for part of the route which again would be great to link to. I love the way you are building on the richness of information in OpenStreetMap and from elsewhere. I have not explored the opportunities to add costs and times into OSM in relation to ferries. Do be aware that by exposing Wikipedia links where these are available you will incentivise people to add such links to the OSM data – currently there are few such links because there are few services that use them.