I’ve managed to get a list of dockless rental bike dropoff points from my local council. I’d like to add these to OpenStreetMap as I think it can be useful to see them visualised on a map to identify in advance where you can end a rental bike journey, and also, for my use case, to lobby the council where they need to create more dropoff points to keep the system usable.
The list I have from the council includes physical dropoff points where there are marked bays, and virtual ones, where there is an agreement with the rental companies that bikes can be left but without physical demarcation of bays. Adding the virtual ones would break the OSM rule that features need to be verifiable on the ground (which they may sometimes be, by the presence of rental bikes, but the bikes are often abandoned where they aren’t supposed to be). The evidence I have for their existence is the list from the council and that they will appear as little “P” symbols in the rental operators’ apps.
The wiki page says “The bicycle rental service must have reserved parking spots, clearly indicated by signposts or some other signage”
There are locations already which I did add from the apps - as the spaces are allocated by the council I assumed there wouldn’t be licencing issues, but I’m happy to wipe them and reload anyway.
I was originally planning to conflate by eye, flipping between the dataset from the council and the dataset from the different apps, but should look into conflation options - moot though if I need to delete the existing nodes anyway.
What I received from the council is a spreadsheet of council IDs for the dropoff points, location, type (virtual or physical), location descriptions and latlongs.
The apps I used (which, when I compare to the spreadsheet dataset look to be largely the same) are:
Please obtain that information before adding anymore. Is the council the data owner and able to give permission?
Our data sources need to be squeaky clean and needs to be usable for any purpose by anyone, someone who may use it to make an app challenging the apps you mentioned.
Are the existing nodes you have added from this spreadsheet or somewhere else?
Before you continue please follow the import guidelines mentioned earlier in this thread.
Outside the data validity I am not sure we should be adding unverifiable data into OSM.
I don’t know to what extent this is relevant, but it looks like Voi’s Belgian operation has a GBFS[1] feed for their area. As a layman the license they link to doesn’t seem to be friendly to re-use to me so if that’s the general attitude of the company then I’m not sure how re-usable the London data will be if it ultimately turns out to be theirs.
I’ve been asked to follow up with you to check that the data is available for re-use with a completely open licence (ie nobody asserts copyright over the data)? This probably depends on whether the council collated the data or it was collated by Lime or Voi or someone else (in which case I would need to approach them). I presume the locations of the physical bays was entirely the council’s work and can therefore be published in OpenStreetMap where they appear as little bike symbols as in the attached screenshot? Did the council decide on the virtual locations too, and if not, do you know where that data originated?
The specific licence that OpenStreetMap uses is the Open Database Licence which is explained here: Open Database License - Wikipedia
I received the following reply:
I can confirm the virtual bay locations were decided by the council and that you can publish this data on OpenStreetMap.
Is this sufficient? I’ll review the documentation about imports and automated edits too.
Also I’ll stick to the physical bays which can be verified “on the ground”. The virtual bays are being phased out anyway, I believe.