I drive through, and the camera gets me. I’ve discovered at least 3 roads with such time restrictions only after I get the PCN emailed to me and I have to pay £80 every time. Because London is byzantine I can’t remember all the “no-go” roads, so I’ve been caught in the same roads multiple times in the last 3 years or so. I’m getting tired of this as I want to do the right thing, but can’t feasibly read every sign on every road while I drive.
Some examples of already-tagged roads:
Two questions if I may:
Anyone know how I may get this data to ensure it’s added to OSM? Would this be a series of FOI requests to local councils? Feels like a lot of work to get a dataset that will change rapidly anyway. Any ideas welcome.
Are the above examples tagged correctly? I have some conflicting information regarding the format of time restrictions (with or without brackets for the time period?) and I’d appreciate a sense-check.
Someone is inevitably going to say this, so I might as well get in first. Yes, you can read every sign on the road. If you can’t, you’re driving too fast. You must read and obey signs in order to use public roads.
The restrictions will usually be implemented by a “Traffic Regulation Order” imposed by the local Highway Authority. This would usually be a County Council or Unitary Authority, but will be National Highways (in England, or equivalents in other devolved nations) on roads they control. I’m not sure how things work in London. I think each borough runs their roads, with Transport for London overseeing strategic routes.
Anyway, you could try asking a Highway Authority for a list of all Traffic Regulation Orders of the type you’re interested in using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). However, some Highway Authorities may still only keep these records on a paper system, in which case the request could be rejected for taking too much time. (I think this is the case for my County, Norfolk.) If they do have an electronic list, then it would still need things matching up to individual streets in OSM, and the relevant access tags being applied. I imagine doing this for any reasonably sized area would be quite an undertaking.
as that most closely mirrors the wording on the sign. There would be other ways of representing the same restrictions though.
I don’t know if the sign corresponds to Way: Hartington Road (1047517061) | OpenStreetMap or not. But on that route the tag motor_vehicle:backward:conditional | permit @ (Mo-Sa␣08:00-19:00) only applies any restriction in one direction and doesn’t allow taxis during that time. Traffic in the other direction isn’t restricted at all.
Not where I live. Some signs are completely overgrown. There is a A road (a bypass) where the huge sign showing the roundabout exits is completely overgrown for both the green board and the (local routes) white board. The speed limit sign is nearly gone too.
It’s made me pay more attention to signage elsewhere. An alarmingly high number of signs are not being maintained and are slowly disappearing into the overgrowth all around this area.
Some highway authorities publish notices of traffic orders in The Gazette. You can search notices for the street name, filtered by selecting Environment & Infrastructure / Roads & Highways.
Other highway authorities only publish in the print edition of the local rag, after which you’ll need to beware of the leopard
Thank you for the tagging syntax. I do find the existing documentation quite confusing so it’s good to have someone say “I’d tag it like this”. You’re right that that photo is from Hartington Road - one of two signs on opposite sides of the road, with a concealed camera catching people who fail to grab their one chance to notice & read the signs. There is no signage from the other direction, so the original mapper is right that the restriction only seems to apply to motor vehicles travelling NW. I have updated the way.
In terms of getting the data - sounds like I should not get my hopes up.
Digital traffic regulation orders D-TRO service - GOV.UK is potentially useful. This is an effort to collect TROs in a standard format everywhere. I tried out the API maybe a year ago, and they do at least have a bulk export option. Frustratingly, there isn’t just a map of all of the data collected yet. I reckon time-restrictions like this could be in there.
In Cambridge, a very persistent person very helpfully managed to get an archive, bit by bit, through FoI, from the council and has put them online:
This though highlights the difficulty here: TROs are basically paper documents designed for an area when maps were made by drawing, and many will be in files in local authority archives. It will be a long time before this stuff is all made available, never mind in a proper digital format.
I’m trying to add this example to the wiki to help the next person, but it doesn’t seem to allow me to upload any images - I would like to add the photo of the sign. As soon as I click “Insert Media” and then “Upload” it says “you don’t have permission to upload this file”. I am otherwise able to edit the wiki to add text. Any advice?
Thanks! The problem was that my account is not “confirmed” as I haven’t edited the wiki before. So I need to go prove I’m not a spammer to be allowed to upload images. Makes sense. Wiki:User confirmation - OpenStreetMap Wiki
