CycleStreets blog

We're pleased to announce the availability of a new domain name to access CycleStreets pages via shortlinks – useful for adding to Twitter and other messages.

http://cycle.st/

will redirect to the main site, as will all URLs in the same pattern, e.g. cycle.st/about

There are also short links for journey plans and Photomap URLs:

http://cycle.st/j20000  - redirects to journey 20,000

http://cycle.st/p80  - redirects to photo 80

http://cycle.st/jp  - redirects to the journey planner main page

http://cycle.st/pm  - redirects to the Photomap main page.

All work with www at the start also, e.g. www.cycle.st/p80

The shortlink for each page appears at the bottom-left of the page, so you don't need to remember these patterns.

We hope you find these useful!

PS We were planning originally to use cyclestree.ts but it turns out we'd have to wait for a new country to be founded – .ts doesn't exist as a country code!

You can now create a 'cycle to us' link box for your organisation's own website, that looks like this:

Visitors following the link will then get your location pre-filled as the 'cycle to' location in our journey planner.

It's simple – all you need to do is go to www.cyclestreets.net/link and enter your postcode plus, optionally, the name of your organisation/business.

You'll then get a customised link and some HTML code you can drop into your website.

Add a 'cycle to us' link box to your website now!

This summer has been ridiculous busy for us. We've had a large number of projects, which has felt a little overwhelming at times!

Simon is our 'routemaster', and he's been working solidly over recent months on a range of improvements to the journey planning engine:

• Main focus has been speeding up the routing engine performance. Thanks to the generous grant from the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund, Simon has been able to dedicate a lot more time than usual on this aspect, such that the system is now fast enough and scalable for mobile usage with a lot more traffic. We're finishing off a final improvement to reduce the response time further.
• Working on improving the translation from OpenStreetMap (OSM) into our optimised routing network format (codename 'Cello');
• Working to fix the 'ferry routing bug' (where routes in London sometimes end up using the Thames ferries rather than cycling!);
• Reducing wigglyness of routes – which is becoming our main focus as the performance work is concluded;
• Speeding up the import time so that we can reflect changes in OSM more quickly. (We're a little way off 'live routing' but that's our ultimate aim!);
• Simon will then be moving on to supporting more advanced data types in OpenStreetMap.

Martin, who tends to deal with usability, code structure and the project management side of CycleStreets, has been working on a range of things:

• A problem-reporting system for Cambridge,  www.cyclingsorted.org - which has just been launched and which we'll blog about soon
• Managing mobile app development, with our iPhone app about to be released (and Android offerings hopefully very soon after – thanks to our volunteers working on that!)
• Starting work on a mobile HTML version of the site … stay tuned!
• New interfaces that use the same database, e.g. www.londoncyclehire.org and others (watch out for blog posts on this soon)
• Working on adding bikeshop data views to the system
• Reworking the Photomap interfaces (thanks to funding from Sustainable City)
• Work which will enable the map size to be increased and related interfaces improved (ditto)
• Adding new functions to our API (used by mobile and other developers)
• A large amount of cleaning up the code behind-the-scenes. Over time, the codebase has had structural problems which has meant adding new functionality and design changes had become too time-consuming. Much of this is now done, but you won't have noticed any changes – other than (hopefully) things appearing faster! This has really been the enabling work for a lot of other projects.
• A London-based project to deal with the cycle parking deficit across the city, to be announced shortly!
• Information for Local Authorities
• Grant funding applications (we could definitely do with a fundraiser still!)
• Shortly starting work on a better feedback interface to make this area and map-based rather than table-based.

We've obviously also other voluneers working on various areas including:

• Working on the mobile versions
• Responding to feedback
• Bike-shop related things for OpenStreetMap, using data we brokered
• Various outreach opportunities

We've just launched www.londoncyclehire.org, the premier new Cycle Journey Planner for the London Cycle Hire scheme!

Martin Lucas-Smith, developer of the site, said:

“With the launch of the new cycle hire scheme, London enters a new phase in cycling promotion. Transport for London’s scheme will get many more people cycling in London at a time when cycling is already growing.

“But many people don’t know good routes in London. Simply by logging on at www.londoncyclehire.org , people can plan routes before they leave, get an estimated time for the journey, get a choice of faster or quieter routes, as well as check out StreetView images of each part of the route.

Just click a start and end point, or search for locations/postcodes, and click ‘Plan journey’ – it’s that simple!”

The website is an initiative of CycleStreets, the UK-wide cycle journey planner, which provides cycle routing all over the UK. Created by a not-for-profit group, the system gives both fastest, quietest, and a ‘balanced’ route, thus catering for both experienced and newer cyclists. It also takes account of hills, traffic lights, one-way streets, and many other aspects, and the routing is being continually developed.

Simon Nuttall, our ‘Routemaster’, said:

“We've been banging on about how great it is to be able to cycle around cities for years. We built our cycle journey planner to share our knowledge of the best ways to get around. There's never been a time when this has been needed more – just as London is going to get a whole new fleet of riders. Plan your route across the city, add photos of your experience and feedback so that we can improve the suggested route. – It’s a whole virtuous cycle!”

“When you climb on your new hire bike for the first time, you'll be climbing on a new transport system, and like other transport systems, you'll need a guide. Our journey planner uses the knowledge gathered from London's cyclists to help you choose which way to go.”

Martin added:

“We can’t wait to try out the new bikes this weekend. And as someone who grew up in Kingston, I hope that the system will reach outer London too, soon!”

CycleStreets routing is also being used by several new mobile phone apps, including cyclehireapp.com, the forthcoming Bike Hub app, TrackMyJourney, and CycleStreets’ own app, due to be released in August.

The routing data comes from OpenStreetMap, a project akin to Wikipedia. A large amount of the data has been collected by volunteer cyclists on the ground, and in London is fast becoming the map of choice, with an immense amount of detail and information. CycleStreets imports the new data each week, making it always up-to-date.

Notes:

• www.londoncyclehire.org is independent of Transport for London. It is free to use. The site is now live and ready for use.
• Contact us for more information
• A complete list of features is available at http://www.cyclestreets.net/features/
• CycleStreets is run on a not-for-profit basis, and is Company No. 06948959.
• A summary of information about OpenStreetMap, the premier source of open mapping data, is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap
• Work to improve the routing for mobile use has been possible partly thanks to a grant from the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund.

We've added a new polling stations section to the CycleStreets Journey Planner, which locates the polling stations as destination points:

http://www.cyclestreets.net/journey/places/pollingstations/

Currently this covers just Cambridge, Edinburgh, Wokingham and most London boroughs, but we can add more if we receive the data (see below).

Can you help us add other areas?

To add an area, we need a spreadsheet e-mailed to us containing the following headings:

• Longitude, Latitude (two columns), or Postcode
• Polling station name/description
• Location, e.g. street/place (optional)

These have to be spreadsheets (preferably a CSV file) – sadly we don't have time to do PDF extraction ourselves at the moment.

The London data is from the data.london.gov.uk website.

We’ve now added a Street View facility to the itinerary listing pages. We think this will really help people to visualise the routes planned in many urban areas.

Many thanks to George Coulouris, who wrote the main code to integrate this facility into CycleStreets.

To use it, just go to an itinerary listing, e.g. Itinerary 100,000 and click on the ‘Street View’ icon   next to any segment of the route, and the Street View panel should open just below that point.

Please do use the feedback button to provide a bug report if it doesn’t work in your browser. It seems to be OK on FF3/IE8/Chrome but more testing is welcome.

The system uses Google Street View, which is limited to some urban areas only, although Google are gradually covering more areas .

We’ve created some long-needed documentation: Overview of CycleStreets: your questions answered, covering a number of areas:

• Features: Cycle journey planner
• Features: Photomap
• Many more features
• Homepages for 1,500+ towns/cities/districts around the UK
• Branded versions for Local Authorities and others
• Community-based, not-for-profit
• The map data: where it comes from and how you can contribute
• How we use the map data
• The routing engine
• The cartographic map base
• Open-sourcing

Many of these are things which we’re often asked about, particularly from people within the technical community.

Just a short blog post as we’ve been relatively quiet in the last few weeks!

Simon in particular has been knuckling down on some new core routing algorithm work which is set to speed up longer journeys in dense areas like London. We’ll blog on this soon, once a key bug has been squashed.

We’ve also been working to improve the backend feedback system so that it will be easier to get more local contacts on board. We’re working through quite a backlog of feedback and better management of this is a priority.

We also hope to be welcoming a few new members to our team shortly. This has highlighted the need for further improvements to the clarity of our code. We remain committed to open sourcing the code once auditing and reorganisation has been completed. With only 1.2 of us, and little funding, a larger team will be a great help.

Lastly, we’ve been putting the finishing touches for a new branded website front-end for Cambridgeshire County Council to enable members of the public to pinpoint locations where they’d like to see cycle parking created and obstructions removed, building on the Photomap code in CycleStreets. More news on this soon!

PS Great to see more Local Authorities starting to link to our journey planner, Edinburgh being the latest! We’re working on our Local Authority strategy as the routing engine matures and route quality is ramped up gradually.

Until now the ‘quietness’ of the suggested routes has been a fairly discrete percentage score.

We’ve add a graphic and some descriptive text that gives a quick overview of how busy a route might be:

The overall quietness of a route depends on how much of the journey is spent on the different types of road. The quietest paths, such as dedicated cycleways score 100%, and busy roads 50% or less. We hope this makes it clearer in helping decide how suitable the suggested route might be for you to ride.

We’ve added a new features page that describes most of the existing functionality of CycleStreets.

Check it out!

We’ll add new stuff to it as the system improves. We’ll probably also add a few tiles on the actual routing engine features – some new aspects of which are being worked on right now.