300 miles of secret UK cycle paths have been discovered [audio] | Hacker News Reader

300 miles of secret UK cycle paths have been discovered [audio]

bbc.co.uk

173 pointsDanBC70 comments

Here's a text-based article, "How hundreds of miles of lost UK cycleways from the 1930s have been rediscovered using Google Street View"

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4487592/Lost-...

This provides much better information!

The Daily Mail providing better information than the BBC, I never would've guess it.

BBC news quality has an extremely sharp cut-off for anything outside of the M25

These days it's basically just a British RT for everything inside the M25 too:

http://i.imgur.com/puUAKrc.jpg

My mother is a true believing Daily Mail reader, to her the BBC might as well be the TV branch of Socialist Worker, so it depends where you're coming from.

To be fair, that's just Kuenssberg. Plenty of more leftie stuff too.

Much as I detest its politics, the Mail is the most visited English-language newspaper site in the world, to be fair.

Yes, and gangnam style is the most viewed youtube clip ever.

Daily mail is not bad because of politics but because it's exploitative, sensationalist, devoid of empathy and does absolutely _anything_ to get a click/view/reader. It stands for nothing, there are no standards, nothing is too low and no story too sensitive to bulldoze.

Are you suggesting that Gangnam style is anything but catchy, entertaining, and brilliant satire?

I don't think these two things are similar in the way I suspect you believe, other than that they are popular.

The point I was making was that popularity does not equal quality. This doesn't mean I think gangnam style is particularly bad, but is it the best?

I think very little can be gaged from the amount of views something gets on the internet, be it the daily mail or gangnam style.

gangnam style is a deeply insightful (though i don't know myself if it is accurate) critique of korean culture. it's not necessarily popular because it's insightful, but definitely a bad analogy in your case

My Dad always used to point out that it was the only paper that campaigned for Stephen Lawrence to bring to light institutional racism in the Met Police.

Not a minor issue by any means, absurdly here's a link to the Guardian write up on it.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/jan/04/stephen-lawren...

Broken clock correct sometimes. News at 11.

It did that because a relative of Lawrence knew Dacre (the editor) having been employed as a tradesman by him.

Given the near-racist tone of some of their other coverage of black crime in London, I put this one in the "oh I don't mean you, I know you, you're fine, it's all the other ones I have a problem with" corner.

I detest its politics, but I love reading the nypost... Papers like this are as much for entertainment as they are for news.

Papers have a social duty to represent the goings-on of the world to their readers. If they're publishing fabricated stories 'for the lols', then I feel they should be clearly marked/presented as substantially different to the newspapers who do fact-based reporting.

Oh, that story where we called you a child-molesting tax-dodging illegal refugee? That was clearly a joke!

Private Eye manages to both entertain and inform, but it's very dry.

Archaeologically, in the centuries to come, this will either explain a lot, or condemn us.

Excuse my colourful language, the DM is a shit newspaper ... understandably excluded from fact based discussions.

For all it's many faults their policy of long descriptive headlines followed by bullet point summaries is a model I wish all news sites followed!

Given their success I'm not sure why more don't.

And photos large enough to actually see. Very sad that the Daily Mail is leading the way here.

Perhaps real information is harder to source than fake info, and real news is too scant to benefit from that format. Also why papers bury the lead. (To make you read their hard work.) As an exercise go to the BBC and edit the first three articles you find into that format - you will see why they don't want to do it.

I.e. the interests of the readers are in conflict with interests of the paper.

Frankly, if they want to bury the lede to make me read their hard work, then I'll gladly not read the article at all, unless forced to (rare these days).

> For all it's many faults their policy of long descriptive headlines followed by bullet point summaries is a model I wish all news sites followed!

Thanks to this ML can use it as a summarization dataset.

I hate bullet point summaries in news stories, they're distracting and add clutter. They should at least be hidden and only viewable when clicked.

What's wrong with the submission, content-wise? Is everyone just mad that it was originally broadcast on the radio instead of published in a newspaper?

Do I have to be mad to prefer text over audio when trying to get the news on a computer?

I'm not saying it's a mad preference, but I don't think it's reasonable to be mad that radio-broadcast content was later published online for your convenience, but not transcribed for you.

Sometimes when people say "mad" they mean crazy. That's usually what brits mean. Other times, "mad" means angry. That's usually what Americans means. However, based on the context of my parent and grandparent comments, I have no idea what either of them meant, and I don't think they do either. It's late at night though.

The good thing about having no pretension (or feigning class) is that you can focus purely on user functionality over some preconceived ideas of what a newspaper should be.

As much as it's obvious that DailyMail is low brow, and personally not being from the UK, I have still found myself on a number of occasions spending time on the site and getting lost in various random articles.

They've certainly done a good job with the site. Mastering how to tease stories and communicate the juicy bits.

Likewise you could praise the Nazi's for their warfighting ability even if their cause is detestable :p

> DailyMail is low brow

That's not why people avoid the Mail, nor its poor/working-class associations. They publish poorly-researched scientific stories, have institutional racism, sexism, & homophobia, & rewrite stories from other news outlets with minimal credit. They also support & push the agenda of the right-aligned political parties (fascists in the 40s, Conservatives, now UKIP).

> Likewise you could praise the Nazi's for their warfighting ability

So this was a fiction put up by the British post-war historians, since many Wehrmacht officers relocated to the UK after WW2, and the military historians fawned over them + the fiction "small force of exceptional warriors attacked and held off the Communist hordes" went down well with the general reading public in the midst of the Cold War. Liddell Hart disputed this.

You can learn from their battlefield doctrines and copy their battlefield arms, but their inability to hold strategic oil resources & coming second in the technology races meant that, despite their fighting, they lost the war.

UK newspapers are uniquely awful, and the Daily Mail is among the worst.

It's not the "lowbrow" that's the problem.

It's privacy invasion stuff like this: https://twitter.com/MalwareTechBlog/status/86593783564328550...

Or the amount of successful complaints to the regulator: http://www.newstatesman.com/media/2013/12/man-who-hates-libe...

> In the files of the Press Complaints Commission, you will find records of 687 complaints against the Mail which led either to a PCC adjudication or to a resolution negotiated, at least partially, after the PCC’s intervention. The number far exceeds that for any other British newspaper: the files show 394 complaints against the Sun, 221 against the Daily Telegraph, 115 against the Guardian.

Or, as the UN said, the unique and hateful focus on immigrants: http://www.unhcr.org/uk/protection/operations/56bb369c9/pres...

> Overall, the Swedish press was the most positive towards refugees and migrants, while coverage in the United Kingdom was the most negative, and the most polarised. Amongst those countries surveyed, Britain’s right-wing media was uniquely aggressively in its campaigns against refugees and migrants

[...]

> In contrast, coverage in the United Kingdom was the most negative. Despite the presence of newspapers such as the Guardian and Daily Mirror, both of which were sympathetic to refugees, the right-wing press in the United Kingdom expressed a hostility towards refugees and migrants which was unique. Whilst newspapers in all countries featured anti-refugee and anti-migrant perspectives, what distinguished the right of centre press in the UK was the degree to which that section of the press campaigned aggressively against refugees and migrants. This could be seen in the preponderance of negative frames and the editorialising in favour of Fortress Europe approaches.

Or the really creepy sexualisation of children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9dqNTTdYKY

The printed paper is different to the website too. It's possible to use the website without seeing all the worst bits of the DM.

All of this just makes it really worrying that they're so popular.

> Sometimes when people say "mad" they mean crazy. That's usually what brits mean.

I'm British; that's not what I meant here.

I'm sorry if anyone annoyed that the BBC chose to publish a radio broadcast instead of text misunderstood me, but I would note that if one took me to mean 'crazy' then my sentence was ungrammatical.

If one instead charitably assumes grammatical correctness on my part, 'mad' reads as it was intended, and no offence should be caused.

No offence was taken in any case, it was just a bit confusing.

The Daily Mail is, for the most part, a toxic news institution. However, occasionally they'll publish something non-divisive.

I only read it for the TV guide!

That's your choice of course. Out of interest, if all you're looking for is a TV guide, why not get something that's tailored for that purpose, such as the Radio Times?

The Mail article of course ripped off as usual; check the timestamps against the Guardian article posted earlier that same day.

edit: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2017/may/0...

No fan of any news papers and certainly will never understand the slavish devotion to the Guardian as a paragon of truth that exists. I'm also not about to defend the Daily Mail, but what's to say that both weren't independently working on similar articles and the Guardian managed to publish first? Why is the default that they were ripped off? Also, stop reading newspapers! They all lie and pedal fake news, the 'Guardian' included.

I was very confused while looking at the images, this one in particular: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/~/article-4487592/index.html#i-4f...

"They [the cycleways] were rediscovered by a historian using Google Street View"

It is hard for me to image this to be anything else but a cycle lane. As a Dutch person, it is hilarious to me that it takes a historian to identify them. For comparison, this is what a cycle lane looks like in the Netherlands (and they are absolutely everywhere): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Vrijligg...

"At the time, the Ministry of Transport was working on plans to create a Dutch-inspired cycleways all over the country"

Never been to Netherlands. By looking at the cycle lane I cannot understand where people walk.

That is just a (rural) road without footpaths. Outside of the town limits pedestrians tend to share the space with the bicycles. Such roads aren't frequented by many pedestrians in any case because they cover larger distances that most Dutch would use a bicycle, car, or public transport for.

This is what a shared road within town limits can look like:

http://www.fietsberaad.nl/library/repository/ontwerpvoorbeel...

Ref: Kickstarter campaign mentioned at the end of the clip: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/carltonreid/lets-rescue...

There must be quite a lot of data from cyclists carrying GPS devices that could establish, I imagine, a map of almost all cycle-able routes in the UK quite readily? Has anyone compiled this data or made an effort in that direction, fitbit et al.?

Strava puts out a heatmap every year. It does include other outdoor activities like running though.

http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#6/-120.90000/38.36000/blue/b...

Wow, that's excellent - interesting to see some of the "running" routes that don't have any cycle-data (one near me is a golf course).

It would be nice to zoom in some more, but I think even at the max zoom level I could get to I can make out some homes of Strava users, which might - for example - make targetted burglary an issue. Some error data is clearly present too, like shadowing of roads where there are systematic errors.

Thanks for the link.

You can set a an area around your house to be excluded from your public data to avoid this. I hope that extends to heat maps too, I've never actually checked that.

I can confirm that it does. I live on a private drive, but set my exclusion zone to less than the distance to the public street, and I am the only regular Strava user in the neighborhood. The area near my house is black, and it lights up at approximately the spot I would expect!

I can see a number of my favorite routes highlighted, which is interesting! Also, up north in the national forest middle of nowhere, I can see my favorite logging road dimly glowing. I don't think anyone else uses it!

The exclusions are only from your own rides.

If a friend rides to/from your house then that will appear in the public data.

Just remember not to centre the privacy zone on your house, otherwise it may be possible to work out where the centre of the privacy zone is from a few data points around the zone.

Hahaha, out of curiousity I zoomed in near my house and saw a curious little stub off a road with a pretty high usage. I was confused until I realized it was a local brewery tasting room. Nice place to end a workout!

If you're a premium/paid Strava member, you can also get your own personalised heatmap. I'm slowly working my way through running every single one of my local trails and streets.

Post-war austerity and 'modernization' also put paid to Britain's extensive pre-war rail network, which Britain is struggling to replace at great cost today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts

Double ironic that some of these disused railway lines - with fantastic rights of way directly from town centre to town centre - have been turned into cycle tracks.

Where has this happened?

It has happened near where I live (South West UK). Here are two examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_and_Bath_Railway_Path

http://www.sustrans.org.uk/ncn/map/route/colliers-way

Newcastle has one as well towards the coast, even has a buffer stop to signal where it used to run. Luckily there is now the Tyne and Wear Metro which replaces it

Good find! 3 more days before the kickstarter ends and I just submitted my first pledge!! I truly believe in a more efficient (cheaper?) means of transportation. The more big city/country to expand cycling, the better.

Might not be too realistic. This path [3] has to be buried under the A3.

[https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1yoi-eZVATatYQfhMiK...]

Nice, the routes in Billingham are there. Even though they're a little worn, they are fairly well used

How significant can these routes be given that they were lost?

As was mentioned in the audio clip, the usefulness of the routes depends on the surrounding cycle network. Since these cycle paths were built, the cycle network in the UK has grown, so some of the routes could prove more immediately useful now than they were in the 1930s.

To give you an idea of the scale of the current UK cycle network:

http://www.sustrans.org.uk/ncn/map

That's a misleading map. The majority of NCN routes are just ordinary roads. Just because somebody put a few signs up doesn't make them safer than other similar roads. They're often narrow, overgrown at the sides, and full of potholes. In most cases I'd rather cycle in urban areas. At least there the traffic is slower and more predictable. And the off-road routes are frequently impassible for all but mountain bikes because of mud.

Don't miss http://cycle.travel/ which uses OpenStreetMap data to build bike friendly routes (accounting for surfaces and traffic and hills and so on).

Made by HN user Doctor_Fegg.

Or similar osm-based http://www.bbbike.org/ with more international coverage

They do different things - bbbike is for route-planning within select cities, cycle.travel aims to do whole-country networks so you can ask for (say) NYC to SF and get a route back in seconds.

That's fantastic, thanks for the link. I particularly like the idea of suggesting cycle-friendly circular routes, when you have no destination in mind.

I think there is also a revive of cycling as transport. Stockholm have seen a sharp rise in cycle commuters the last few years.

As people become more aware of both health and environmental issues, the tendency to choose the bike increase.

Knowing that they exist can be helpful in opening the routes back up for use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_way_in_England_and_W...

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