Help complete Matt Parker's bridge sign hunt — FME volunteers wanted

Hey FME Community,

If you haven't come across Matt Parker before, he's a mathematician and stand-up comedian whose YouTube channel Stand-up Maths has over 1.3 million subscribers. He's one of the most popular maths communicators on the internet. His recent video, "What is up with UK bridge height signs?", digs into a genuinely fascinating quirk of UK infrastructure that I think will resonate with anyone in this community.

UK bridge height restriction signs display limits in both metres and feet/inches. Per the Traffic Signs Manual Chapter 4, each measurement is taken independently, then separately rounded down for safety (3 inches in imperial, 0.1 m in metric). Because the two rounding schemes step at different intervals, the same physical bridge can produce signs that read, say, 4.1 m / 13'6" in one location and 4.1 m / 13'3" in another, and both are technically correct.

Matt's collaborator Adam Townsend mapped every theoretically possible metric/imperial combination and has been hunting them down in the real world. The results live at Height Hunt, complete with a map of verified finds. They're nearly done, but one combination in the main range is still missing, plus a number of smaller signs that may or may not exist.

Where FME comes in

​@LizAtSafe did some digging and found that there's actually more existing data to work with than Adam may realize. The Shrewsbury sign he mentions first in the video is already on OSM, and there's an existing community-contributed max height map built on OSM data, with its own contribution workflow. It's not complete, but it's a real foundation to build on rather than starting from scratch.

That's where FME could do some heavy lifting:

• Ingest and reconcile the existing OSM maxheight data against Adam's catalogue of theoretically possible combinations
• Flag anomalies (the video identifies at least one sign that's likely a measurement error, and systematic validation could surface more)
• Ingest crowdsourced submissions (photos + locations) with OCR to read sign faces
• Geocode, dedupe, and maintain a clean spatial dataset
• Publish verified finds to a live web map and feed results back to Adam's catalogue

What I'm hoping to find

FME users willing to take this on, whether independently or collaborating with others in the community. Depending on the response here, we'd love to take the best work back to Adam (and maybe Matt), or if you'd rather reach out to them directly with what you've built, here's Adam's catalogue to reference: https://adamtownsend.com/heighthunt/

Most importantly: if you have a go at this, please share what you find in the comments below. Whether it's a working workspace, an interesting anomaly you've uncovered, a gap in the OSM data, or just an approach you think could work, we want to hear it. The more the community shares, the better the chance this turns into something we can genuinely bring to Adam and Matt.

Cheers!