In January, we asked your views about the future of the Road Schemes section of CBRD. Here's an update on what's happening now.
First things first: any plan to close it has been postponed. The response was far, far greater than anything I anticipated - and if you're one of the people who got in touch, thank you.
As a result of the feedback, my first problem is that I'm no longer sure I can trust my website statistics, which told me only 1% of visitors ever went to the Road Schemes pages. To fix that, I've set up new software that will provide much more detailed figures, and it will need to run for a few months before it produces anything meaningful.
In the meantime, I've done something to see if I can make it easier to navigate the Road Schemes pages and to stimulate some more interaction. Good news for Road Schemes fans - far from being removed, it just got much easier to navigate.
Introducing "map view"
You can now use tabs at the top of the main Road Schemes page to switch between the existing list view and a new map view, which shows all the current and future schemes plotted on a single map of the UK. You can click the symbols to see more information or link to the full scheme page, and you can even use the filters at the top of the page to adjust which schemes appear on the map.
It's not designed to replace the list view, but it should make it easier to browse around the country and see what's happening and where. There's a lot of squiggly lines and markers drawn onto the map, so it works well on desktop computers and tablets, but you might find it a bit fiddly or slow to load if you read the site on your mobile.
It's early days for this new feature yet, and I'll continue tinkering with it through this week, so please let me know what you think in the comments.
Introducing something else entirely
Here's something extra as a reward for reading to the end of a dull blog post of website news.
Regular visitors can already get updates using the RSS feed or through Twitter, but if neither of those appeal to you, you might like this early invitation to follow the new CBRD Facebook page. There's not much there just yet, but I'll post new updates and other interesting stuff there in much the same way as the Twitter feed.
Comments
Great to hear that the "axe" has been put away! I think the map view is a great idea. A shame some of the official sources aren't as proactive or quick.
Fantastic news. It is clear all visitors must get behind this study as if we do not use the new roads section we clearly will loose it. As a maps geek anything new with maps is always a winner. Thanks
I appreciate the "Map view" is still a work in progress . Just noticed that the A90 Laurencekirk Junction Improvement scheme is absent from Map View.
Thank you.
Thanks for spotting that. Map View picks up whatever lines and markers are drawn on the map on each individual scheme page, and the Laurencekirk scheme had nothing on its map. I've added a junction marker and it now shows up on Map View.
Thanks Chris. A1 North Yorkshire: http://roads.highways.gov.uk/projects/a1-leeming-to-barton-improvement/ shows now motorway status from 26 February 2018
Wow, Chris, thanks...
Will gladly keep things updated in my area, but I live in Cumbria.
Need to get them building first...
Kendal Northern Relief Road would be a start!
Great stuff. I use the road schemes page all the time, actually one of my favourite bits of the site.
Great news about this. Its a very useful site.
Good man. I always feel like I'm amongst friends here.
The right choice Chris... good news.
If the workload is high, is there any way it can be offloaded? I'd be willing to offer help if practical. I'm thinking maybe not making it an "anyone can edit anything wiki", but more like "keep the pages in an open source repository on github, to which contributors can submit pull requests that you choose to accept or not".
Or something else, it's just a thought.
Sometimes, just sometimes, youre my hero !
thanks for keeping the Road Schemes :-)