We've added a new polling stations section to the CycleStreets Journey Planner, which locates the polling stations as destination points:
http://www.cyclestreets.net/journey/places/pollingstations/
Currently this covers just Cambridge, Edinburgh, Wokingham and most London boroughs, but we can add more if we receive the data (see below).
Can you help us add other areas?
To add an area, we need a spreadsheet e-mailed to us containing the following headings:
- Longitude, Latitude (two columns), or Postcode
- Polling station name/description
- Location, e.g. street/place (optional)
These have to be spreadsheets (preferably a CSV file) – sadly we don't have time to do PDF extraction ourselves at the moment.
The London data is from the data.london.gov.uk website.
3 thoughts to “Cycle to your polling station!”
Are you feeding this information into OpenStreetMap?
I was just in their irc channel hearing how polling stations are getting mapped. It seems to be polling_station=yes or polling_station=2010, ideally added to the node or area that is hosting, e.g. an amenity=church node. If you make the lists you get available then you might get some people on OpenStreetMap adding them on while others ask for the missing lists.
If we had thought of this earlier then it could have made a good Project of the Week (like Image of the Week) which gets posted on the OSM Wiki homepage, various blogs and mailing lists.
Data for Edinburgh at: http://cpol.edinburgh.gov.uk/getdoc_ext.asp?DocID=137560 Unfortunately in “printed then scanned” PDF.
The data is coming from a database table at our end, as this stuff has been knocked up in a few hours very quickly – but next time – and for a lot of other things like locations of schools, we definitely want this stuff to come out of OSM rather than run our own local data. (It’s high up on our to-do list to extract piles of location points from our weekly OSM import, but sadly this is not in place yet.)
The data so far is taken from:
http://data.london.gov.uk/datastore/package/polling-stations-london-2010-local-general-elections
http://www.cambridge.gov.uk/public/googlemaps/pollingstations.xml
Lee – The data for Edinburgh I saw earlier, but unfortunately it’s presented in an unusable format as you’ve pointed out. If you live locally and can get it out of the Council in a way which includes both the name and a postcode (or lat/long point) and put that into a spreadsheet then I’ll gladly import it!