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 followed us, please click that button and then you'll be alerted when episodes are released.

And don't forget that all the episodes in series one are all still available to listen to. Thank you for listening to The Water Rd.

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