CycleStreets blog

We're pleased to announce the launch of a major new section of our website:
Points of interest that you can click on to view and select for your journey.

Points of interest

We've integrated OpenStreetMap location data so that you can now click on points on the map. Just go to our journey planner tab and you can use the presets like bike shops, cafés, pubs, and many more.

(Mobile app developers: This data is also available through our API – see below.)

For instance, stations:

If you select a point, it is clickable. A Google Street View picture of the location will be shown, if it's a roadside location:

There's a link in the popup to the place's website if it has one.

There are lots of different POI types available:

You can browse locations anywhere the UK, for instance to find these independent bike shops in London:

Please add locations to the map!

If a place you know of doesn't appear in the map, please contribute your knowledge to OpenStreetMap by using the Edit section of our website. Warning: it can be quite addictive!

Or perhaps no-one's added a location's website yet? Click on the 'add it' link in the popup shown above. Follow the link, click on the icon, click on 'Advanced' and then enter 'website' on the left and the URL on the right, and click Save. You'll need to create an OpenStreetMap account if you don't have one already.

You must not copy things from other people's maps, however – additions and edits must be based on your local knowledge of an area.

API

This data is now all available through our API so that it can be integrated into your cycle routing app.

For full details, see our API documentation.

(We hope to have this functionality in our own apps shortly. If you can help patch it in, please branch our app repo and pitch in!)

Thanks to the brilliant work of Andy Allan, Richard Fairhurst, Tom Hughes, Dave Stubbs, Matt Amos and others, who have worked on OpenStreetMap's new 'Potlatch 2' editor, we've now been able to add an integrated data editor to the CycleStreets site.

Just go to www.cyclestreets.net/edit and you can fix up and add map data directly!

We'll be customising the installation and integrating it more with existing pages and tools within the CycleStreets website in coming weeks.

Changes you make to the data go into the OpenStreetMap database directly. We then import that data every week or so.

(In other words, changes you make via our editing page don't reflect the routing immediately, but take up to a week. We're working to reduce that down, ideally towards a daily import now that we have more powerful server hardware thanks to your donations and some grants!)

The work to integrate Potlatch 2 into the site was extremely easy – it's clear that Andy et al have worked very hard to make that as simple as possible. (In fact, it was refreshing to find that integrating an external piece of software was straightforward rather than the usual problematic task it can often be!)

We'd also like to thank Tom Chance, whose excellent introductory guides we adapted, with his kind permission.

For The Win!
#p2ftw

OpenStreetMap, the project whose road/cycling data makes CycleStreets possible, has recently acquired a dataset of all bike shops in the UK from the Association of Cycle Traders, for the purposes of merging this dataset into the OpenStreetMap database. We are enormously grateful for the ACT for this data.

We need your help to merge this data into OpenStreetMap fully! Andy and Shaun from OSM have created a webapp for the specific purpose of merging this data into OSM.

The bike shop locator is a simple web app to help OpenStreetMap contributors to map all of the bike shops in the UK. As all of the shops supplied are only as accurate as the postcode, an import would not be good. This app is also a significant improvement over the previous method of using a wiki page to track whether all of the supplied list is in the OpenStreetMap data.

To use it:

1. Go to the map view of the new tool.
2. Click on one of the orange circles in your area and follow the link to that shop's location.
3. Go to the link at the bottom of the page ("Show local area") and click on the Edit tab to go into the OSM editing view. You can then add/remove/edit the bike shop location in OSM.
4. This guide to adding a bike shop may be useful for novice OSM editors.
5. Once the data in OSM is correct, on the bike shop page of this new tool, click on either "This is in OSM" or "Not found on the ground".

CycleStreets acted as the go-between between the ACT and two of our OpenStreetMap contacts Shaun and Andy, both of whom are great supporters of our project. We are enormously grateful for the ACT for the data, and it is to be used in the forthcoming new (and free) Bike Hub iPhone app, which we're really looking forward to, not least as (like our own app, now in review at Apple) it features CycleStreets routing!

OpenStreetMap as a community tends to be cautious about mass imports of data because it can clash with existing data. A fair number of bike shops are already in OSM, and so this data should help get full coverage more quickly.

At present the bike shop data coming from the 'places' part of our API is the raw dataset we received from the ACT, as merging into OSM naturally takes time. Once that is done, however, we will internally switch to pulling the data from OSM as it will have increased accuracy then.

(… 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.