Right to Roam
Monday 20 September 2004
The "Right to Roam" law came into effect in some parts of the UK yesterday and the Government has set up a website where you can check access in affected areas (access to affected land can be stopped by the landowner for up to 28 days a year). I live near the Lower North West area which was opened up yesterday and I'm looking forward to walking on some large areas of bleak moorland without looking over my shoulder all the time.
Unfortunately the the website is a bit of a flop. Even at 6:00AM yesterday morning when I doubt there was a huge number of ramblers planning their day out walking, the site was running very slowly, images were missing, and operations such as zooming in and out were flaky. This morning the site has completely ground to a halt. Maybe the task of implementation was farmed out to one of the large consultancy companies that do a lot of government IT work with consistently less than spectacular results. In the early days of the web it was common for sites to fail as soon as they went live but surely the state of the web development has moved on from then.
As it happens, Miguel de Icaza mentioned the Google Local mapping interface yesterday and, if you've not already seen it, it's worth checking out as an example of a very slick mapping interface.