Summer 2020 at Travel Mapping

[Jim]

Many AARoads Forum regulars are also users of Travel Mapping (https://travelmapping.net/) or are at least aware of it.  It's been a productive summer for TM.  For those who don't check in on us very often or at all, I would like to point out some recent projects, beyond our ongoing efforts to expand and improve the underlying highway data.  It's easily the biggest set of enhancements since TM's initial implementation.

The "Mapview" tool (https://travelmapping.net/user/mapview.php?v) has been enhanced with an option to be able to load and display all TM routes currently on the visible portion of the map as you pan and zoom around.  You can jump to a given location by name (subject to the limitations of the Nominatim project's geolocation capabilities).  Stats are optionally displayed about each visible route.  Segments of routes can be colored according to criteria including the highway system to which they belong, the number of TM users who claim to have traveled that segment, and the number of TM routes that share that segment of road.  You can click on a segment to see who has traveled it.  There is also an option to mark your current location on the map, subject to device support.

What TM traditionally has called the "Highway Browser" is really a few tools: some to help find routes among the highway systems and geographical regions covered by TM, and some to view the actual highway information on the map and to find the information you need to track your travels in TM.  (For those unfamiliar, you submit your travels to be included in TM through a plain-text .list file that lists all of the segments of TM highways you have traveled.)  The original "browser" functionality to see tables of routes by system and region remains.

A brand new tool called the Route Finder (https://travelmapping.net/hb/findroute.php) has been implemented that allows you to load up a giant table of all 60,000+ routes known to TM and then filter by various categories to find what you're looking for.

Once you've found the route you want to see, the "Show Route" tool has been redesigned to view either just a route within a region (what TM calls a "chopped route", like the portion of I-90 in one state, which was the only functionality previously), or the entire route (in TM terminology, a "connected route", so all of I-90 from Seattle to Boston).  The most impactful (in my opinion) new functionality is the .list Tool where you can select start and end segments of the portions of the route you've traveled, and the .list file entries are generated for you.  This should make building and updating the .list files to plot travels faster and less error-prone.

In a change that spanned both the data processing and web front end code, you can now include .list file entries that use the connected route rather than the individual chopped routes.  So if you've traveled I-90 from Richmond to Daytona Beach, you can specify that with a single .list entry rather than having to list separate ones for the portions in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.  All previous functionality is and will continue to be supported.

In the first of what I hope will be a few new pages inspired by some of the old Clinched Highway Mapping project's pages, you can now see your "Top Stats" for things like longest clinched routes, most travels on a route, and routes closest to being clinched.  For example, my stats are at https://travelmapping.net/user/topstats.php?u=terescoj .

Finally, our project's documentation, both for users of and contributors to the project, has been updated, clarified, and expanded.  The "Get Started" page is linked from the top of every TM page: https://travelmapping.net/participate.php .

Thanks to everyone who contributed to and continues to contribute to this effort by writing code or new manual entries, testing, making suggestions, etc.  We continue to welcome your suggestions in the TM Forum at https://forum.travelmapping.net/ and new users are always welcome.

[hbelkins]

So, do all these updates mean that it's going to be possible someday to post your travels by clicking on a map?

[Jim]

So, do all these updates mean that it's going to be possible someday to post your travels by clicking on a map?

I have no plans to add mechanisms that would allow users to enter travels into the database directly through the site, but hope the list tool is a nice step in the right direction for usability.  It won't happen this summer, but I'd like to extend the list tool to be able to process multiple routes on the screen at the same time.

Why no direct entry into the database through the site?  Putting aside the complexity of concurrent database updates and having to updates stats on the fly in those cases (significant issues, and would require a rethinking of the whole infrastructure, but solvable problems given time), I don't want to open the door to all of the potential security problems that come with having the database writable through a user-facing web front end.  [I don't want to think about the repercussions if a security incident on my server caused some kind of data breach at my college, so I'm not going anywhere near that!]

[Rothman]

Thanks for all that you do to keep the site running, Jim.