CycleStreets blog

CamTechNet have kindly featured us this week in their 'Voices in the crowd' series.

We discuss who we are, the history of CycleStreets, involvement of other people in our enterprise, the Startup community in Cambridge, and our hopes for the future.

Read their interview with us!

CamTechNet as an organisation aims to:

• Provide a single platform to publicise all sources of information relating to the high-tech community in the Cambridge area.
• Provide a forum where the experience and knowledge gained is shared, for others to learn from.
• Link like minded people across many technology sectors, and allow them to post and comment on news and events.
• Provide a single platform for presenting high-tech jobs in the Cambridge area, as advertised directly by employers.

Do have a look round the CamTechNet website!

(… or indeed, any other point of interest!)

We’ve just had a feedback posting asking how a bike shop can be added to the map. Anyone can add data to OpenStreetMap. Having just replied to the user, I thought it would be useful to turn the reply into a blog entry.

If you have an iPhone, the simplest way to add locations like bike shops is to use the MapZen POI Collector app.

Alternatively, you can have a go adding it yourself via a web browser! Just follow these steps:

1. Go to the OpenStreetMap website.

2. Create a free account (top-right).

3. Scroll the map to the place where the bike shop is, and click on ‘Edit’ near the top. Use ‘Edit with save’, which means you won’t accidentally cause a problem.

4. Double-click the point where the shop is, and a green dot will show.

5. Click on the + symbol in the bottom right

6. Type in ‘shop’ and ‘bicycle’ in the bottom-left boxes.

7. Then click on ‘save’ and it will be done.

It will then be shown on the map within CycleStreets in a week or so, when OpenCycleMap (whose map pictures we use) imports the new locations.

A fuller guide to editing, including videos, is available.

Google have just launched bike routing in various cities around the United States, after involving the cycling community there. A few people have asked us (and our US-based equivalent, Ride The City) what we think.

The simple answer is that more availability of bike routing is a good thing.

There is undoubtedly space for CycleStreets, Google and others to co-exist: each will have their own benefits and niches, and competition means that everyone ends up with a better product.

Google’s US bike routing sends an even clearer message that cycling is a normal and realistic form of transport, something which we as campaigners have argued for years. It also increases the use-case justification for online cycle routing being part of the interventions needed to help get more people cycling as part of their everyday lives.

In other words: systems like CycleStreets and whatever Google may come up with in the future in the UK are good for promoting cycling, which is the only reason CycleStreets exists.

If anything, when Google decide to do UK cycle routing, we think it will be more of a threat to the Government’s Transport Direct portal, who will find it increasing difficult to justify spending public money on a closed system while commercial and community enterprises are doing the same thing better and more innovatively – in ways which involve the cycling community.

We’ve added a new page: Ways to get involved with CycleStreets.

Do get in touch if you can offer any help!

PS We’ve just reached the 20,000th photo in the Photomap!