CanalPlanAC -- the canal planning website

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

presented by me, Adam Porter. If you haven't yet subscribed or

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And don't forget that all the episodes in series one are all

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Water Rd.

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