Missing cities in Scotland

Support City/Street/Node Issues
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Source: Missing/Broken Cities Tracker - #4 by JamesChevalier

I found this Google docs: Missing/Broken Cities Tracker - Google Sheets

Most of the “cities” in Scotland aren’t cities. They’re just towns. Also afaik there’s no administrative level below admin_level 6. I live in Irvine, Scotland (currently line 99 in the file) and the lowest adminstrative level for this is the North Ayrshire council area, which is relation 1910014 in OpenStreetMap. Sure, it’s big, but it’s better than nothing. And other council areas like Renfrewshire are also in CityStrides.

North Ayrshire has an Open Data Portal which has a map of
locality boundaries. There are 6 of them and they are also relected on Our localities Archive - Northayrshire Community. I didn’t grow up in Scotland and I have no idea what their importance is. They aren’t reflected in OSM anyway.

Campbeltown on the other hand is just a landuse=residential in OSM. Also a bit weird to use that as a “city”, but at least it’s possible to collect streets there.

Would be nice to have all Scottish council areas in CityStrides. I can look up all the relation ids if that helps.

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Completely agree.

I looked at the the source you referenced and I really don’t follow the logic of why Scottish council areas are too big to be added - particularly when the streets contained within them are invisible to CS because the towns within them are deemed too tiny.

How are the large, suburban Council Areas in Scotland (or elswhere in the UK, for that matter) any different from townships in the US?

For example, North Lanarkshire: Relation: ‪North Lanarkshire‬ (‪1920584‬) | OpenStreetMap

is no larger than Miami Township: Relation: ‪Miami Township‬ (‪2893726‬) | OpenStreetMap

Yet the former is in CS and the latter is not?

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Feels like there is quite a bit of confusion about what is and isn’t included in Scotland. For example there are some Council Wards for Edinburgh / Clackmannanshire / Aberdeenshire which aren’t towns or cities by any normal understanding, but other places have nothing - e.g. Lanarkshire. At least adding the 32 local authorities would be consistent (and Glasgow as a city is of course defined in City Strides purely by its local authority boundary just now anyway so that has already become the standard in a way…)

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My point exactly.

Currently 75% of the area in Scotland have streets whose completion show zero progress in CS - see attached image

Scotland missing streets
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Adding the 32 Council Areas (Subdivisions of Scotland - Wikipedia) is a straight-forward task that is:

  1. Consistent with adding state Townships in the US
  2. Ensures that 100% of streets in Scotland are in CS (In the image, any street outside the blue margins is currently missing from CS)
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Totally agree - so how do we go about fixing this? They are all in the spreadsheet queue as far as I can see? @JamesChevalier any suggestions for what we can do to help?

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There’s quite a bit covered in this comparatively short thread. I’ll start with an update on how I’m fixing things up based on feedback in this thread, and then I’ll try to cover each of the individual points.

  1. :heavy_check_mark: I’m removing everything that’s in CityStrides below admin level 6, or places without that tagging
  2. :running_man: I’ll run a full import for Scotland that brings in everything at admin level 6 as cities … This is going to take a while to full process - apologies for the wait & the odd data presentation in the meantime
  3. :hourglass: I’ll rebuild the global city map
  4. :hourglass: I can take feedback on whether any nested cities can/should be re-added

To get a sense of the conversation that will come up next…

To give a general sense of the basic “wtf” behind a city being present in CityStrides … it usually comes down to a few scenarios:

  • I was able to use the generically applicable “admin level 6 is region and admin level 8 is city” to bring in the full country
  • I figured out some other blanket statement for a full country
  • Someone requested it, and there wasn’t overlap with another places already in CityStrides

I had always figured this was an OpenStreetMap issue, with lower areas just not being mapped yet. It’s helpful to hear that the lower administrative levels just don’t exist.

:thinking: This seems to contradict the idea that anything lower than 6 doesn’t exist. :person_shrugging:

Yeah, great example of a place that must’ve been requested as a one-off addition.

In the case of Scotland, it wasn’t that things were excluded because they were too small, it’s because nothing is mapped any smaller than level 6. At least at the time of me initially adding this data to CityStrides in the first place (things change).
When I compared admin level 6 in different places, I saw that at the US State level (province, prefecture, etc) and that seemed wrong to me. I wouldn’t add Rhode Island as a city.

The Council Areas appeared to me to be roughly twice the size as US townships.
(I’m not saying I’m right, just how it appeared to me, which in turn influenced my past decisions)
It’s also fairly uncommon, across the US, for townships to be present. I think it’s just Ohio, maybe Maryland, and another state or two … and even in those cases, the township additions are the outlier - every state uses the admin level 8 designation, and then I fill in the blanks where I can (usually townships or CDPs).

Oh for sure and we haven’t even brought up England … yeeesh :sweat_smile:

I’m pretty sure this is a result of me taking one-off requests for places to be added, without going back to reassess the whole of Scotland. I’m usually pretty systematic with my processes, but things can get away from me sometimes … Hopefully I’m able to resolve things here in this thread, though.

Careful, those are dangerous words :rofl: there’s really not much of this that actually ends up being straight-forward. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, though! :muscle:

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James, Thank you for the thorough response!

Your 4-step plan makes sense. There very well may be some proper cities nested below admin level 6, but it sounds like those will be added back

And I definitely misspoke when I send a straight-forward task! I did not mean these were exercises that wouldn’t take time. What I had meant was the logic of adding the Council Areas (which all appear to be Level 6) was straight-forward…a better word may have been a “consistent” task.

But even that sounds like it may not be true after all of this is said and done, as there seem to always be exceptions and anomalies! Thanks again for your support.

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Well, things are definitely different this morning! I’ve lost my previously completed ‘cities’ of Dunfermline and Carnoustie. Dunfermline was originally the only area in the county of Fife that was on the system and was then nested inside Fife. Now it is gone. Carnoustie makes a bit more sense as it is a town and is part of the bigger council area of Angus.

However I did discover a very huge area called East of Scotland and I’m just about to investigate if all the actual council areas like East Lothian are there to be bagged.

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I’m also a bit confused that missing nodes are appearing all over areas I’ve walked in Scotland but not in other parts of the world.

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I’m having a similar issue – I’ve completed ~1100 streets in Glasgow which is wholly contained in West Central Scotland of which I’ve only completed 81 streets. Very odd.

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I believe James is still in the midst of working through the processor-heavy tasks he listed in his portion of this thread, so these counts may not be final, however I suspect what you’re experiencing is the nested “city” phenomenon.

As far as CS is concerned, Glasgow is a city contained within the “city” of West Central Scotland, therefore all streets within it are also within the boundaries of the “city” of WCS. If it gave you credit for 1100 streets in Glasgow and 1181 in West Central Scotland WCS), that would be double-counting because the total number of streets in WEst Central Scotland (16,002) also contains the several thousand in Glasgow. CS is doing the right thing here by not giving you a total streetcount of 2281 streets because that would be grossly overcounting the number you completed.

The way things were working before, anyone who completed a street outside of Glasgow but within the other massive portion of WCS would get NO credit for completion.

Your profile is marked private, but going off of what you have shared, your net gain in streets you were given credit for has been 81 streets.

Again, James is still working through these steps, but overall, in terms of CS streetcount, these changes should be a win-win for everyone.

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Oh, no worries - I’ve done it to myself as well. I don’t know how many times :rofl:

ohno
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Oh yeah - I updated my post above with this … It’s going to take a while to reprocess all this data. There are currently over a million jobs queued up - about a 12 hour delay right now. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have another day or two for it all to finish up, though.

Hrm, yeah, that West Central Scotland looks fully redundant. After all the processing is done, I’ll double check to verify that all the inner places have full coverage & if they do I’ll delete that one.

Oh, and the global map is partially updated. I thought the first phase of city import was done, so I ran that job, but I was mistaken. I’ll rerun it again after these jobs wrap up. In the meantime, it will still look like there’s not 100% coverage in Scotland.

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In my opinion the same for Eastern and Southern Scotland

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Thanks Jim. Appreciate what you’re doing to give us more coverage.

Not sure if it will be possible to nest Dunfermline back into Fife but glad for the additional areas,

Catriona

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Happy New Year Jim!

The problem where the already walked areas were appearing to need to be walked again has sorted itself out which is great news.

I do seem to have dramatically jumped up the leader board, which, although it is satisfying, I don’t think it’s legit. I did break the 10,000 street mark, ironically while walking in Massachusetts in October, but now I seem to have over 15,000 and I definitely know that I haven’t bagged that many extra streets in the new Scottish areas on the system! Is this something that will again sort itself out with the jobs you have running in the background. I suspect that Eastern Scotland, which incorporates Edinburgh where I’m back to 100%, is being double counted somehow as I got a ‘Congratulations you’ve reached 15% of Eastern Scotland’ email when I woke up this morning.

Apart from that I’m absolutely delighted with the extra areas and now I’m off to target Midlothian! Thanks for that New Year gift!

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A post was split to a new topic: Missing cities in Northern Ireland

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Happy new year!

Given that you’ve said that west central Scotland is redundant I guess you’ll remove it in the fullness of time? Otherwise, I’ve noticed that Glasgow and Paisley have two roads of the same name but a couple of miles apart (see attached). If using council areas, because they’re so large, you may already have a fix, but I figured I should flag it!

My personal west central Scotland issue with street count seems to be largely resolved now.

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A post was split to a new topic: Progress calculation in a very long activity