The Colne Valley Viaduct Crosses The Grand Union Canal
Suprageography | A blog by Oliver O'Brien
by Oliver O'Brien
1w ago
A quick visit to the Grand Union Canal between Harefield and Denham, at the point where the Colne Valley Viaduct, part of the HS2 railway, crosses it. The construction of the two-mile-long viaduct has been creeping towards the canal for the last two years, and new the red construction girder has slid across the canal itself, and is installing the concrete segments of the permanent structure below. The construction means that the east bank (which is part of the London LOOP walk) is closed for a couple of weeks, while the towpath on the west bank has now reopened, but closes for 20-30 minutes ..read more
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All the Boroughs?
Suprageography | A blog by Oliver O'Brien
by Oliver O'Brien
2M ago
Back in 2018, I did a London Borough Challenge – visit all 32 London Boroughs, plus the City of London, in as short a time as possible. I made things hard for myself, by taking a photograph, within each borough and of the name of the borough (e.g. street signs, salt-bins, libraries etc). I didn’t particularly plan the challenge, but just started near where I lived. I also did it at the weekend, where public transport options can be reduced, and started quite late in the day, with no food taken and only one drink bought. I managed to visit all the boroughs in 9:25:23. My route was 121 miles, sp ..read more
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All the Docks 2
Suprageography | A blog by Oliver O'Brien
by Oliver O'Brien
9M ago
Yes, we did it again. All the Docks 2 took place in London on 9 July. Five teams (up from three last time) each cycled between a fifth of the Santander Cycles docking stations in London. I again did the routes, splitting up the ~800 docking stations into 5 routes of 160 docking stations apiece. To make it more of a challenge, this time we started in central London, at the same docking station we were all to finish at, with the teams looping out from central, before returning. Each team was to visit exactly the same number of docking stations, with routes measured at around 71.7km +/- 1km maxi ..read more
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Consolidation
Suprageography | A blog by Oliver O'Brien
by Oliver O'Brien
1y ago
In an effort to focus my (now rather limited as parent of two young children) spare time on a more nuanced set of web projects, I have consolidated some websites. Three Blogs into One I have combined two other blogs into this one: blog.oomap.co.uk – My personal blog, with notes about London, orienteering and cycling. This was my original blog and goes right back to 2003. bikesharp.com – Writing about shared micromobility in the UK. This blog has had less writing than I had planned, as shortly after I started, I was contracted to write similar articles for Zag Daily, for the last couple of yea ..read more
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Big Feed Tidyup
Suprageography | A blog by Oliver O'Brien
by Oliver O'Brien
1y ago
At the end of each year (normally between Christmas and New Year), there’s a lot to tidyup across Bike Share Map (BSM), the Meddin Bike-Sharing World Map (BSWM) and the UK Shared Micromobility Dashboard. This year, I’m aiming to document all the changes needed, roughly around the time that I make the changes. Monday: Superpedestrian (aka LINK) have unexpectedly changed their URL prefix for their GBFS feeds from https://wrangler-mds-production.herokuapp.com/gbfs/{City}/{file}.json to https://mds.linkyour.city/gbfs/[2.2/]{a2}_{city}]/{file}.json. Superpedestrian run the Nottingham escootershare ..read more
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Zag Daily
Suprageography | A blog by Oliver O'Brien
by Oliver O'Brien
1y ago
You may be wondering why it’s been so quiet on Bikesharp, the last couple of years… well the reason is that I have been a data journalist on this topic for Zag Daily, an online magazine focusing on shared electric micromobility, particularly in Europe and especially in the UK. So I’ve been writing about the UK e-scooter trials, how bikeshare in the UK is going electric, European market summaries, and various other data-driven aspects of how the industry is evolving and developing, here and around the world. So far, I’ve had over 70 articles published there, and also supply the live data feed ..read more
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Colne Valley Viaduct: 1 Year In
Suprageography | A blog by Oliver O'Brien
by Oliver O'Brien
1y ago
It’s just over one year since I last had a detailed look at the worksite for the forthcoming Colne Valley Viaduct, and I was back last week to see what’s changed. Launch Girder The viaduct is being built north to south, and this striking red structure, the launch girder, has just been assembled on the earthworks leading to the northern end. It will soon take a slow journey, sliding the couple of miles across the viaduct, atop the newly created piers, building the main bridge deck from the precast sections being created at an onsite factory. The launch girder sitting on the northern viaduct emb ..read more
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HS2: The Colne Valley Western Slopes
Suprageography | A blog by Oliver O'Brien
by Oliver O'Brien
1y ago
Satellite imagery of the Colne Valley Western Slopes worksite in early April 2021, from Sentinel. The tunnel portal is at the top-left (NW corner), just before the M25 motorway. © Sentinel Hub. High Speed 2 (HS2) will leave London by curving away from the Chiltern Main Line, across the Colne Valley on what will the the UK’s longest railway viaduct. It crosses the Greater London boundary before briefly coming back to ground level and then on into the Chiltern Hills in a long tunnel. The place between the viaduct and the tunnels is called the Colne Valley Western Slopes. It is here that Align JV ..read more
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The Really Old with the Really New – Migrating Old Code
Suprageography | A blog by Oliver O'Brien
by Oliver O'Brien
1y ago
One challenge I have been dealing with recently is moving many old web applications off an old (Ubuntu 18.04 LTS) self-managed server onto a new, centrally managed one. The project has been necessitated by needing to move our physical servers into a properly managed data university centre (with more reliable power, and freeing up server room space for teaching space on the central university site). Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is also coming to its end-of-life in April, so work was always going to need to be done anyway. This has proved to be a big project for a number of reasons: Moving from Ubuntu to R ..read more
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All the Docks: Technical Notes on the Routes and Map
Suprageography | A blog by Oliver O'Brien
by Oliver O'Brien
1y ago
Routes I created GPX route files for the challenge. These were created manually in QGIS, using the OpenStreetMap standard “Mapnik” render as a background, by drawing lines, with Google Street View imagery used to check restrictions. I split each team’s route into 12 stages (so 36 altogether), which were initially each just over 10km and ended at a docking station. Each stage contained between 10 and 40 sequential legs to docking stations. I’m not sure I would trust proper routing engines (based on Google Maps or OpenStreetMap, normally) to have found better routes on each leg between each dock ..read more
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