Yes, it is possible to cross Dublin without passing a pub | Hacker News Reader

Yes, it is possible to cross Dublin without passing a pub

kindle-maps.com

139 pointsrcfox58 comments

I claim a super-pedantic "unproven".

For this to answer the real question it would have to work on a map from the 1920s.

There used to be far more pubs in the British Isles than there are now: in some cases 6x as many (for instance the Village of Cottenham where I used to live once had over 30, it now has 5).

Still - I like this very much.

Less pedantically, it does not seem like anyone has tried following the route to make sure that there aren't any pubs on it (the article even mentions that it initially passed two pubs, so it is plausible that there are others not included in the OpenStreetMap data).

it does not seem like anyone has tried following the route

The anti-pub crawl?

There are people checking it today. I (and others) have checked it on Google street view.

Confirmation has come in. The route is sound, e.g. http://twitter.com/#!/davemolloy/status/81278042198114304

Why has the number of pubs gone down so much? Have pubs consolidated into fewer larger pubs or is the time spent in pubs down drastically because of other entertainment? I guess I still have a romanticized view of Ireland with uilleann pipers in every pub...

From talking to two ex-publicans I know that:

1. Pubs are very expensive to run, and are difficult not to make a loss on. Rent goes up and up, and chain's prices go down. 2. The smoking ban in England caused a lot of pubs to be tipped over the edge and had to close down. 3. The price of alcohol being increased through taxes has had quite an effect.

So in recent terms, I'd say these changes in society has led to a lot fewer pubs. However, I don't know much about the history of pubs in GB, so there was probably an earlier decline with alternative reasons - which I'd be interested in hearing.

Also, Tesco and other supermarket chains sell six-packs and crates of lager for £ cheap at the low end, and have huge ranges of real ales and imported wines at the other end.

People may drink less now, but they also drink differently.

While we may drink less the beer and wines we drink are twice as strong.

Some of those would apply to Ireland, and some not. Ireland has some differences from the UK for pubs. 99.9999% of pubs are not chain pubs. A chain pub here, might have 3 pubs. All pubs are 'free houses' and can sell anything. (This means they sell all the same big brands. There's none of the Real Ale/CAMRA stuff which is a shame). Likewise there was a smoking ban a few years before UK.

No new pub licences have been issued in about 100 years. So if a country pub closes down, the licence is usually sold on (for €€€€) to open another pub somewhere else.

Pubs and legislation has changed. At the turn of the last century (1900s) people could open their front room as a small pub. So while a small village might have 30 pubs few of them were Inns - the large pubs that we are used to. Ireland kept the small room longer than England - they still exist in the west.

While a front room with beer on sale may not be our modern idea of a 'pub' it would have figured in James Joyce's quote.

I'd suspect the law has gotten much stricter about who's allowed sell beer. There were probably a lot of speakeasies and people operating small public houses out pc their houses.

There is a project on OSM to also tag historical information. If this project was far enough, then you could take for example year 1920 and run the same algorithm. But with the current dataset, this is the reasonable "best effort"

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=52.286949,0.125136&spn=0....

Here's Cottenham. It's tiny. Try to fit 30 pubs evenly onto the map. Then try to cross it without passing one.

Impossible.

(plus a half of it is new builds - so a realistic density could be 50 pubs)

It really says something about Dublin that the path avoiding pubs passes right by the Guinness brewery.

I argue that the gravity bar on top of the Guiness brewery is a pub.

Do night clubs count as pubs? The route passes right in front of Krystle/Dicey's on the junction of Clonmel and Harcourt Streets (just after going through Iveagh Gardens - btw what do you do at night when they're closed? ;)).

Now, Krystle and Dicey's are, afaik, both owned by the same hotel and they are officially classed as nightclubs. However, most of their clientele are not hotel guests and it's a very popular spot for after-work beers (particularly in the beer garden during the summer). I think, were Joyce around today, he would class it as a pub for the purposes of this experiment.

I think trying to go down Harcourt St. is a mistake as it's a well-known night spot.

Dicey's is definitely a pub.

I bet there's a tiny market in selling tourist maps to people who'd like to visit a big city, but skip all the "sinful" influences.

I bet there's a market in the opposite, too.

Cool project: The "I need a map of where I am on my 3G Kindle now" demographic is out there waiting to be tapped!

(ps, if the author is reading this: you've misspelt "your" on the homepage.)

Yeah offline maps is the next project!

Hi all. I'm the one who made that site. Any questions ask away.

  The algorithm starts at the start nodes, and find all the
  places it can go from there. It iteratively expands out the
  search until it reaches the target.

I'm not sure I follow. Would you expand a bit on this? Perhaps with a code sample?

I'll upload the code later and explain it a bit more for us techies. This is the 'excutive summary' version./

The key part is the next sentence: "This is a breath first type search". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadth-first_search

although it uses OSM, could you in theory overlay the route path in Google Maps just to see the StreetView for the route to see if it does pass any pubs?

Then if you did find a missing pub, you could avoid that road, or put a call out for someone on the ground to verify it's status, and location

I used Google Street View to double check the route. I didn't need to do anything complicated with overlaying the route, just have 2 tabs open.

Next up: crossing Seattle without passing a coffee shop...

Crossing SF without encountering a pandhandler would also be brilliant. I seriously doubt there's a datastore currently available to plot something like that.

There isn't and there won't because that'd be impossible to keep track of without tagging every homeless person in the city like cattle with RFID chips.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke

You could have a location aware smartphone app that let you hit a button to log coordinates and a timestamp for every bum you spot. Maybe a feature add-on to Trapster?

just provide free RFIDified pans for them to handle

I'm going to release the source code, you could try it if you want. :)

This is ultra-pedantic, but there is that barge on the canal between Leeson St and Baggot St bridges that would almost certainly count as a pub.

Where I live in Norwich, England, there's a popular local expressions: "There's a church for every week of the year, and a pub for every day" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwich#Architecture) - it sounds like there's just over 1000 pubs in Dublin, so we're slightly outnumbered there, although Norwich does have the highest number of pubs per square mile in the UK... Pubs Per Capita anyone?

>although Norwich does have the highest number of pubs per square mile in the UK... Pubs Per Capita anyone?

This sort of claim seems to be quite common: http://www.guardian.co.uk/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-1563...

As a very quick and very dirty test yell.com gives 103 results for "pub" in "Norwich" and 101 in "St.Andrews, Fife". St.Andrews (pop 18k, I think that's when the Uni is in) is much smaller than Norwich (250k) - at most the former is 3km across and maybe 1km the other way, Norwich is roughly circular and about 10km diameter (from a quick look at Google Maps). However, yell probably just use a "within X km of the location" metric for returning results, so ...

Someone at Yell could tell you with a couple of SQL queries no doubt.

St. Andrews has a brace of churches too.

Now that's another interesting thing you could do with OpenStreetMap.....

Market opportunity for a new pub in Dublin.

Getting a pub licence is hard.

And expensive. I thought for a while about how to work around it. For example, you might open a private members club. Would that work? I always wanted to open a table tennis pub (like Dr Pongs in Berlin if anyone has been), and I figured that since it's centered around an activity, you might get away with private members club.

I think going through Iveagh Gardens is a bit of cheating, eh? :)

You have to walk past the Radisson Blue Hotel on Golden Lane. Is it a pub? Debatable. Have I drank there, definitely.

Edit: They address this towards the bottom.

Hotel pubs are a contencious issue. It's debateable. I might re-generate it excluding hotels.

Really cool tho. I'd offer to go verify the route but why would I want to go and do that? Can you plot a route through town with the most pubs (maybe w/ a maximum distance constraint). I will help verify that map.

We could have a hacker news map verification day for that map :-D I'd certainly be up for that.

[GRATUITOUS PLUG for http://tog.ie, right around the corner from Golden Lane.]

+1 for TOG, a great hackerspace in Dublin, Ireland

...but, why would you want to?

Can someone overlay the route on http://dublinpubcrawl.net/ and we'll see what's what.

how DARE you even try and figure this out. That's like trying to figure out how to ninja-sneak through a harem of beautiful harlots and not get loved-up. why!?

Now I know witch root never to take, thank you.

Now try this in Prague.

At 30,000 ft.

Why???? D:

Because they could and damned if that isn't reason enough.

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