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Thursday, June 29, 2006

Walking Access Consultation Panel
PO Box 2526
Wellington

To Whom It May Concern:

In May 2000, President Clinton signed a declaration removing Selective Availability from the Global Positioning System (GPS). Overnight, this allowed GPS receivers to be used in many more recreational situations in New Zealand, as they were now accurate to 5-10 metres. Previously, with Selective Availability, the error introduced hundreds of metres of inaccuracy. This increase in accuracy suddenly made it possible to repeatedly return to the same location, and to use GPS receivers for more accurate navigation.

The New Zealand Recreational GPS Society was formed in 2003, and provides an active online community via the website. Members and supporters of the Society are active in many traditional recreational activities including – for example, tramping, mountain-biking, hunting and fishing. There are also new activities that have been created since Selective Availability was disabled including geocaching and geodashing that specifically involve the recreational use of GPS receivers on publicly accessible land.

Focus of the GPS Society’s Submission

In the past three years, GPS units have grown to include powerful mapping capabilities, and at the same time have been dropping in price. It is now possible to load the entire topographic database of New Zealand into a late-model GPS receiver.

Members of the Society also produce the three leading GPS maps for Garmin GPS receivers in New Zealand – covering a wide range of maps including routable road maps, topographic and even free maps. Garmin tend to be the most widely used receivers amongst Society members, one reason for this is that they support user-created maps.

The Society’s members represent a wide range of activities, and for more specific comments regarding public walking access, we would defer to submissions made by organisations representing a given activity. The Society’s approach to this submission is more focused on the technology, information about access rights, and specifically how GPS receivers can be used to provide public walking access rights information.

GPS for Increased Awareness and Safety

The Society recognises that when venturing outdoors, it is essential to have training in alternative forms of navigation. There will always be a place for paper maps for navigation, but the Society believes that electronic maps integrated into a mapping GPS will fast become the primary means of navigating, and paper maps will be carried solely as a backup means of navigating. This will happen because of the vast amount of information that can be stored in recent mapping GPS receivers, combined with the decreasing prices, and the ability to accurately locate the position of GPS receiver on the map in real-time. This will lead to increased awareness of ones location, which will hopefully lead to improved safety.

Public Access and GPS

These previously mentioned factors suggest that we are drawing near to a renaissance in the means by which information about access to public space is made available to the public. Paper maps are often outdated before they are even printed, and Internet mapping services require a connection to the Internet to be usable. GPS receivers provide a perfect middle-ground whereby the most recently maps can easily be loaded onto a device with near unlimited capacity for spatial information, without the need for an Internet connection

However, there are many issues related to the use of public information that is owned and managed by public sector organisations. Many of these will impact on the ability to provide a comprehensive and accurate spatial database of public access information. Some of the key issues that will need to be worked through include: -

• Lack of an authoritative roading database – there does not exist in New Zealand an authoritative roading database. The roading dataset maintained by Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) is not up-to-date and does not always reflect the most recently created roads and modifications. There are commercial roading datasets that were derived from the LINZ roading database, and maintained by private companies for purely commercial motives. These are not easily accessible by recreational users. Finally, roading datasets do not currently appear to make the distinction between public and private road access, and this distinction is critical when using roads to travel to areas of public walking access. Paper roads are also not clearly marked as such.
• Lack of an authoritative access rights database – most maps publicly available do not clearly identify private vs public access land. The creation and provision of such a service is a critical step in ensuring the public is properly informed of both public land that they are entitled to access, as well as private land that they are not entitled to access. Such a database may have to consolidate access information from a wide range of organisations – including Local Government, the Department of Conservation, Trusts, and land managed by private owners where public access has been provided.
• Licensing and copyright on information relevant to public access – there is little point in providing the access right information, unless it is possible to produce derivative works, and redistribute these free of charge. To ensure that the information is as accessible to all it ideally needs to be free, but should also be able to be bundled with commercial maps to ensure the widest possible availability. Restrictive copyright and licence conditions will reduce the availability and update of any spatial information provided.

Conclusion

When taken with the decreasing cost and increasing capacity and capability of GPS receivers, any credible project to provide information about public walking access to land must include a means of providing that information for free and in a format that can be converted for use in consumer-level mapping GPS receivers.

More importantly than the technology though, the New Zealand Recreational GPS Society supports any effort to provide increased public access to our countryside.

Sincerely yours,


Gavin Treadgold
President
New Zealand Recreational GPS Society Inc.

Walking Access Consultation Submission Form

You can use this form to make a submission to the Walking Access Consultation Panel. Copies of this form can be downloaded from www.walkingaccess.org.nz

Send your submission to:

Walking Access Consultation Panel
PO Box 2526
Wellington

Email: info at walkingaccess dot org dot nz

Fax: (04) 819 0745

Submissions close on 30 June 2006, so please make sure your submission reaches the Panel by then.

All submissions are subject to the Official Information Act 1982, which specifies that information is to be made available unless there are grounds for withholding it. If you wish your submission or any part of it to be withheld, please indicate the grounds in the Official Information Act that apply. The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, which will hold the submissions on behalf of the Panel, will take your request into account when determining whether or not to release information. Please note that any decision by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry to withhold information is reviewable by the Ombudsman.

Your details

Name: Gavin Treadgold

Position: President

Organisation: New Zealand Recreational GPS Society Inc.

Address: c/- PO Box 29066, Christchurch

Email: info at gps dot org nz

Questions

Information about access rights

3 What information should be included in a mapping database?

The Society’s recommendations are based on a desire for the information that the Society would want access to, so as to produce maps that can be used with mapping GPS receivers. Specifically, the following types of information are desired and listed in priority order with the highest first.

• Access Area – used to identify an area of public access as opposed to private land. This should be compulsory and should be represented as a polygon feature.
• Entry and Exit – used to identify access points to public walking access land. These should be compulsory for each unique polygon of Access Area type and represented as point features.
• Access Track – used to identify public access walking tracks within an Access Area. These should be optional, but strongly recommended, and should terminate at Entry and Exit points. They should be represented as polyline features.
• Parking – used to identify suitable locations to park that have been set aside by landowners. These should be optional, and represented as point features.

A sample map demonstrating the above types of information desired is included below.

Whilst the initial database may be constructed to record walking access, it should support the addition of other methods of access, such as mountain biking or 4WD access – as appropriate. This may be best managed by associating type of access with each stretch of access track. This is important to ensure a proliferation of silos of information for different types of access do not develop – in effect creating a one-stop shop for public access information.

In addition, public access land that requires explicit land-owner permission should not be classed as true public access land, at least in terms of the database. It needs to be differentiated from true public access land and private land – due primarily to the sometimes-difficult nature of contacting the landowner. In production of GPS maps of the public access database, land requiring explicit owner permission to access may be produced in a separate map to represent the significantly different access status of the land.

It should be noted that no personally identifiable information need be made available in the publicly released datasets.

4 What is an appropriate balance or mix between the provision of paper maps and dependence on Internet access?

The Society’s view is that the most desirable maps are those that can be downloaded and integrated with GPS receiver use. Paper maps are useful for providing redundant means of navigation, but are far superseded by electronic maps for GPS receivers in terms of the quantity of information that can be stored (GPS units can now store upwards of 1Gb of spatial information). GPS receivers also provide integrated real-time positioning on the maps. In light of this, the Society supports any means that enables the spatial information to be made available to produce maps for GPS receivers – anything less could only be considered a partial solution.

More specific comments on the different options presented are made below.

Paper maps

• The project should not directly produce paper maps as they are expensive and outdate very quickly
• The project should provide PDFs at appropriate scales that can be downloaded and printed by end users as appropriate.

Electronic maps

• The Project should ensure that it complies with the eventual outcomes of the governments Geospatial Strategy currently being developed by Land Information New Zealand.
• The project should provide all information via of interoperable geospatial standards and discovery services.
• Online information should be provided using OpenGIS Consortium (OGC) services such as the Web Feature Service (WFS). WFS services are able to be dynamically loaded in an increasing number of software packages.
• Downloadable information should be provided in widely recognised formats such as the OGC Geographical Markup Language (GML) and the shapefile format. Downloads could be made available as ‘geotorrents’ whereby BitTorrent is used to distribute the bandwidth required to provide downloads if the data is significant in size. Various government agencies could potentially share the hosting costs – e.g. MAF, LINZ and DOC for example could seed the BitTorrent tracker. Downloadable data files are required for working in situations when not connected to the Internet, and for producing maps for GPS receivers.
• The project should investigate providing the data to free web mapping services such as Google Maps and Windows Live Local to ensure that the information is widely accessible and easily found by popular mapping services. In addition, the ability to provide access to the data in the new range of downloadable “Digital Earth” applications such as Google Earth, or the open source NASA World Wind should be considered. Commercial software such as MapToaster and TUMONZ should also be able to incorporate this information for free into their mapping products.

5 What map scale is necessary to make the maps useful?

Map scale is only an issue for printed maps, or for PDFs. For these documents, it is probably appropriate to use a scale somewhere between 1:5,000 and 1:15,000 to display an appropriate level of detailed information.

When maps are developed for a mapping GPS receiver, the map developer sets default mapping scales for displaying the information, which can be modified to some extent by the GPS user via GPS map display settings.

For other forms of distribution, such as a web mapping service that can render maps on the fly, map scale is less of an issue. Additionally, users of downloaded sets of vector data in say GML or shapefile formats can set a scale to suit their needs.

6 What other matters do you believe are relevant to making information about access rights useful?

Intellectual Property

Copyright must allow for free redistribution of electronic maps, as well as incorporating the data into commercially available GPS maps to ensure the widest possible use and distribution of the datasets.

The copyright on the data needs to allow the production of derived works from the data to produce GPS maps, as the data needs to be converted into a format the GPS receiver understands.

These are required to allow individuals and organisations to incorporate walking access mapping information into both free and commercially available maps for handheld mapping GPS units in New Zealand.

It is important that there is no discrimination in access to data that favours either free or commercial mapmakers.

Copyright should allow any organisation to freely print or charge for the cost of printing and distribution – within reasonable bounds.

Signposting

7 Is signposting necessary at all?

Yes. Signposting is necessary at the start of the track/access point. It is important to inform people who are looking for the access that they are in the correct location for access to the public land.

8 How extensive should signposting be? (For example, is it more appropriate or desirable to signpost places where people are allowed or not allowed?)

It is more appropriate to mark those places where people are allowed – much like signage for council parks and DOC land. Ideally, signage would follow a nationally consistent standard so that domestic and foreign tourists expect the same signage wherever they are in New Zealand.

Private land owners may choose to mark adjoining land as private.