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2025-09-17-0838

GeoJSON files containing the public rights of way of Bedford

The council of Bedford has an ESRI shape file that contains details of the public rights of way that are in Bedford. I have obtained a copy of this file from the council. The council provides information about public rights of way on its online map. It may be that their map uses more up-to-date information. This ESRI shape file was sent to me on 13th December 2012.

An authority's Definitive Map is the authoritative source of their rights of way. The details of the public rights of way network contained in an authority's data are for information only, and are an interpretation of the Definitive Map, not the Definitive Map itself, and should not be relied on for determining the position or alignment of any public right of way. For legal purposes, an authority's data does not replace their Definitive Map. And changes may have been made to the Definitive Map that are not included in their data. The authority's data contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. Attempting to view this data with more detail than 1:10000 may produce an inaccurate rendering of the route of a public right of way.

The ESRI shape file was made available by the council of Bedford under terms equivalent to the Ordnance Survey OpenData Licence. When I e-mailed the Ordnance Survey about the councils that had, during the last few years, successfully obtained an exemption from the Public Sector Mapping Agreement and released their data under terms equivalent to the Ordnance Survey OpenData Licence, they replied All data exempted by Ordnance Survey is now covered by the Open Government Licence (OGL), which superseded its own OS OpenData licence in April 2015. So it's possible for you to use this data provided you say that it is public sector information released by the council of Bedford under the Open Government Licence.

Elsewhere on this web site, there is a web page about how this web site provides the public rights of way of Bedford in KML format. That web page explains how I've augmented the basic KML with additional information.

I've converted this augmented KML into GeoJSON. Besides giving the longitudes and latitudes of the route of a public right of way, each entry in the GeoJSON also has a name and a description.
The name will be something like:
BF|LITTLE BARFORD|1
There are three parts to the name: "BF" (meaning "Bedford"), the id of the parish/community/area and the id of the path within the parish/community/area.
The description will be something like:
Fo|BF:444|0.454|none|-0.27218|52.20573|-0.27249|52.19950|518166,257796|518162,257103
This gives other information about the public right of way. First, there is a two letter code giving its type which is one of Fo (meaning Footpath), Br (meaning Bridleway), Re (meaning Restricted byway) and BO (meaning Byway open to all traffic). Following this code, there are a unique name, the length in miles, any additional information obtained from the data supplied by the authority (or none), the longitude of its first point, the latitude of its first point, the longitude of its last point, the latitude of its last point, the eastings and northings of its first point and the eastings and northings of its last point.

The following GeoJSON files are available:
GeoJSON file for footpaths in Bedford;
GeoJSON file for bridleways in Bedford;
GeoJSON file for restricted byways in Bedford;
GeoJSON file for byways open to all traffic in Bedford.

Because some of these GeoJSON files are large, the GeoJSON is also available in a large number of smaller files. Each smaller file has information about public rights of way that are in a square that is 0.1 degrees longitude wide and 0.1 degrees latitude high. For example, the file 02W521Fo.json contains details about the Footpaths that are partly/wholly in the square that is west and north of -0.2 degrees longitude and 52.1 degrees latitude.
Here is a link to a zip file containing all the smaller GeoJSON files for Bedford.

The latitude values for Bedford range from 52.05 to 52.32. And the longitude values range from -0.66 to -0.24.