Hello, I'm sitting at the boat's dinette doing a bit of planning
for our journey over the next few months, and as well as my
maps, one of the tools I use, as many boaters do, is a website
called Canal Plan AC, which works out how long each journey
will probably take. It's an extraordinary resource
and a little while back I had a chat with the man behind it.
Welcome to this Canal Plan episode of the Water Rd.
All right, so I'm going to start by
clicking on Plan A Journey, and we spent the winter on the
Macclesfield Canal at Lime View, so I'll put that in as my
starting point. And we need to be at the Quick
Boat Show in May, so I'll put that as our destination.
You can now plan says that's 124 miles, 1 1/2 furlongs and 66
locks, which will take 8 days, five hours and 54 minutes at 7
hours a day. Well, we don't do 7 hours a day
these days, so let's change that to three hours a day, and that
means it'll take 20 days one. Hour and 50. 4 minutes, but
that's if we go direct and we quite fancy going via Worcester,
which is in completely the wrong direction, so let's put that in
as a via point. And that's now 179 and a bit
miles and 215 logs, which will take just over 35 days.
So that's taking us down onto the Trent of Mersey, then the
Staffs in Worcester and then the River Severn, assuming it's not
in flood and Canal Plan helpfully gives me a list of
possible overnight mooring spots.
Anyway, as you can imagine, it's possible to spend hours working
out which route might fit your schedule.
Now the man behind Canal Plan is Nick Attie and I happened to
bump into him a little while back and began by asking him.
How the website? Had begun.
So the whole thing started ages ago in the 1980s when my brother
was doing a computer studies O level and we did a very, very
simple planner. It was like one of these simple
route maps you can get and you just had a code number for each
junction. So it did no planning.
You just said from here to here and here to here and it told you
how many miles and locks it was. And it just grew from that.
So I just started writing these for fun as a hobby programming
way before there was the Internet or anything, and we
just used it for our own use. But when the Internet came
along, there was the opportunity to basically let other people
use it. And why not?
And a friend of a friend, because this was before when
most people were just on dial up.
A friend of a friend living in America had a permanent young
computer and offered to host it for me.
And it was running like that out of his, out of an old computer
in New York for several years. And it's just kept growing.
And you know, people come up with ideas, we come up with
things. It's.
And there you go. Really.
I mean the database of points on the canal system that you've got
on there. Must be absolutely massive.
Because you've got absolutely everything, haven't?
You, yes. And again, that's one of one of
the big changes. I'm one of the things that
really changed the site was stealing.
Stealing an idea from the sort of the Wikipedia approach and
letting people edit it. Because frankly, adding data
isn't what excites me. Writing the programming is what
excites me. So writing codes that other
people can add places and adjust it and add facilities and things
is meant that other people who like doing that can do that.
People can travel around and slowly but surely we're
collecting information on mooring places and where you can
get on and off the towpath and things like that.
Recently put a whole new thing in which has started trying to
build up a database of shops and pubs and places like that, which
again, it just needs people to edit it.
But we're getting that, yeah. So what sort of size is that
database then? I mean, how many places do you
know on the canal system? Well, do I know what does the
programme know? I mean, I mean, I, I, I've
boated, I've boated since the 80s and I, I, when people, when
I meet somebody and they say they're from such a place.
If it's somewhere near a canal, I've heard of it.
If not, I haven't. But the actual it's actually on
the home page has a tiny little statistics bit and it tells you
how many places are actually in the database and only water
because of course it's expanded to the to other countries as
well. I mean, it doesn't get the same
level of usage, but you can plant.
You can. It's got, it's got most of the
European waterways and a good chunk of the North American ones
in there as well. Ohh And Australia, yes, well,
somebody fancied the idea of adding Australia and why not?
And particularly once you've said, well, we can actually have
two separate things, then sort of two separate zones, then
three zones or 4 zones. I mean, it's no different
really. That's a great thing with, with
software, once you've got it working, doubling it and
increasing it. And luckily, as things have come
along and new ideas have come along, the computers have got
more powerful and the memory's got cheaper and the disc space
has got cheaper and the Internet connectivity's got better.
So you can keep pace with it and you can go from what was
basically taxed to lots and lots of photos.
I mean, the number of photos on there, people add photos every
day to it. That's the biggest, the biggest
thing people wanted to do and again it was a bit of a fiddles
making that, but once I've made it I just sit back and let it
happen. One of the things that people
use it most for. Is.
Figuring out how long it's going to take to get from A to B and
you put the places in canal plan and it tells you so how does all
of that work? Deep down it uses something
called Dykstra's algorithm, which if you read books on
computers, science and things is is the an algorithm to find the
shortest route through what computer scientists call a
graph, which is just dots and lines between the dots.
And that's all that's inside it. All that's inside it is an
enormous list of places, an enormous list of things that say
this place is connected to this place and it's that far.
And there's perhaps a lock along the way, or this place is a
lock. And then it just runs right
across the network using your settings to calculate how much
effort it needs to do each little link and then works out
which one is the shortest. And that just happens magically
in the background really is the computer it first ran on would
just fall over if you tried to run it on the size of the
database now, because so many more places have been added.
So you know, it doesn't just connect when you know, we're
sitting here in Market Drayton. It would have had Market Drayton
and probably Ordlem Wharf in at 1 stage.
Now you know, it's got every bridge along the way and every
lock and a few extra things in between.
So most of the links are just going down adding them up.
And of course, you can make it really quite complicated by
putting lots of via points in as well.
You can. It actually calculates it in
each stage. So you need to.
If you're turning a corner, you need to tell it which way you're
going then really, don't you? Well.
It actually almost works the other way round, which is why
what's the furthest place I can get to comes almost for free.
What it actually does. If you say, right, I'm going
from here, it will calculate how long it will take you with your
current set of choices to every single point on the whole
connected system and then pick the one of them that's where you
actually want to go to because that's just the way the software
works. But that also means like you can
easily say, well, how far can I go in a week?
Because it's already done that. So what's the future for a canal
plan then? Have you got plans for it?
Well, there's an endless list of things.
I mean, it basically does everything.
There's an endless list of things.
One of the things I want to do without being more, without
being too morbid or something, is I want to protect it.
I want it to keep going and whenever I want to retire from
it, so I want to actually package it up, document it, put
it up on a software site and hopefully, you know, make it
available to other people so it's so it won't disappear when
I do. So how much of your time does it
take up? Not as much as it did a few
hours a week. At the moment we get automatic
reports when things go wrong. So checking what's gone wrong,
looking at suggestions people have made, fixing bets, dealing
with where something else on the Internet changes.
I mean, that's the problem is use more and more of the
resources. Other things change underneath
you and things suddenly stop working.
So yeah, a few hours a week. I mean, it must be the most
visited canal website. I mean, did you ever think that
was going to happen when you said it?
I didn't. I mean, when it really blew me
away was when Waterways World suddenly ran a little article on
it in 2002. Something like that.
No, I mean, I never, I never expected this on the fair.
I mean, it's lovely to bump into people.
The last time we were out to, about a month ago, well, there
was a higher boat coming up, Audlem, and it turned out they'd
used it to work everything out. And as long as you use it the
right way, that's brilliant. Occasionally you get people who
really want to trust it to tell them what to do when it isn't
there to tell you what to do. It's there to give you the
information you need so you can decide what to do, because
that's what boating's all about. It's all about doing your own
thing. So if it tells you should be,
you know, you're going from here from Market Drayton again, it
says, well, you'll be nozzle or maybe you will and that's great.
But if not, if you, if you only get to Norbury, well, that's OK.
You know, you need to go a little bit more the next day and
that's that's how I've always intended it to be used.
Well, on behalf of all boaters, thank you for doing it.
Thanks. Lovely.
Thank you. No, it's really nice to meet, to
meet fans because you know, you sit there, you sit at your
computer, you're all locked away in a dark room and you, as you
say, it probably is very popular, but you don't really
know. So it's lovely to hear to hear
that. So thank you.
Well, thanks to Nick Attie for that fascinating interview.
And in case you were wondering, as I look at the homepage now,
Canal Plan tells me that the database contains 27,979 places
on 914 waterways totalling 32,195 miles, and there are
41,569 photos submitted by 682 people.
All those numbers I'm sure will have gone up by the time you
hear this. And that's all for.
This edition of The Water Rd The Podcast is produced and
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