CycleStreets blog

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 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

The main focus of our development work over the last few months has been to improve the performance of our routing engine. This has become a priority with the need to serve routes on new mobile platforms, where the expectation that a route should appear quickly is even higher than those interacting with CycleStreets via a web browser. We need to generate routes as fast as possible – as that will form the basis for developing a stronger user experience.

We have explored three other routing engine architectures in addition to the original engine.  This has involved changing our system so that it can interface to all four routing engines. Getting that to work has forced our code quality in that area to improve and become more modular and generic.

One of the routing engines is emerging as a clear winner in terms of performance speed. It is written in the Python language, and is based on some code initially provided by a participant at our developer day back in March. This engine has now been serving all routes since last Thursday. The routes it produces are identical to those produced by our previous system, but they are now generated more quickly (and more reliably) than with the previous engine.

API users (mobile phone interface developers) have already remarked at the speed increase.

We shall be extending this engine to cover other parts of the route generation process that are still relatively slow.

We've been able to undertake this concentrated period of work to speed things up and improve resilience thanks to grant funding from two sources: the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund, as part of our efforts to improve performance for mobile interfaces, and hosting optimisation thanks to a grant from the Co-op Community Fund. We are very grateful for their support.

As previously announced, we're busily preparing a new iPhone app.

We mentioned in our last posting that the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund has kindly given us a grant of £5,000 towards this project. We’re extremely grateful to the Trustees of the Fund for their support – their funding has enabled this much-requested new interface for CycleStreets to come about.

We're pleased to announce today a further grant of just under £2,000 from Cycle Cambridge, which will enable us to complete the mobile project for our initial release. They are doing excellent work here in Cambridge to improve infrastructure and get more people on their bikes, and this grant is one of many ways in which they are helping to promote cycling in Cambridge and the surrounding area.

The two grants will be used for the iPhone development costs and improvements to the core journey planning algorithm/speed to support mobile use for all platforms.

The app will be released free-of-charge, and we expect to launch later this month, possibly during Bike Week.

We've also received a couple of offers to help with an Android app, which is great news. If you can help with either an Android app or ongoing development of the iPhone one, do let us know.

In town somewhere unfamiliar and don’t know how to get home? Want to avoid a hilly area for your cycle journey? Know about main roads but don’t know the quiet route home? Found somewhere that needs cycle parking or infrastructure improvements which you’d like to tell others about?

An iPhone app has been the number-one feature request we’ve received over the past six months. So …

We’re extremely pleased to announce that we’ve obtained significant funding for a full CycleStreets iPhone app, from the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund.

The Rees Jeffreys Road Fund grant is for £5,000, which will be split between mobile development costs and improvements to the core journey planning algorithm/speed to support mobile use. We’re extremely grateful to the Trustees of the Fund for their support – their funding has enabled this much-requested new interface for CycleStreets to come about.

CycleStreets for iPhone will include the Journey Planner, Photomap (including photo upload) and other CycleStreets features.

We are also seeking further funding of £2-5k to cover the remaining costs. This will enable us to add more functionality more quickly, including getting the Photomap into the initial release.

We’ve engaged mobile developer Alan Paxton to carry out this work for us, who is kindly undertaking the Objective-C coding work below a commercial rate.

CycleStreets for iPhone will be released free of charge. (A future version may add paid-for features such as streetname voice emulation which have knock-on costs.)

Here are some early development screenshots!

Other platforms?

We would love to cover other platforms, in particular Android, as soon as possible, although we have no identified funding at present, nor do we have expertise ourselves in the coding required. Development time donations would be welcome from people with knowledge of developing for Android :)

It is also a high priority in our interface development programme to create a generic HTML interface more suitable for mobile devices, i.e. with bigger buttons, a cut-down feature set and quicker downloads. Again, we welcome offers of expertise or coding to help this happen more quickly!

Other mobile apps using CycleStreets routing coming soon!

Some other forthcoming mobile apps will be using CycleStreets routing, via our API – which is really great news! (These will include CycleStreets routing in some form but are not due to feature the Photomap and other parts of CycleStreets.)

Forthcoming apps include:

• The exciting new BikeHub app, which will include a bike shop finder, journey planner and more!
• For London, the London Cycle Hire App, which will help you find one of the 400 cycle docking stations in Central London so you can pick up or drop off a bike – and then plan a cycle journey from there!
• TrackMyJourney, a Java-based app (targeted to Nokia, Sony Ericsson and BlackBerry platforms) for location tracking, map display, navigation and route plotting

If you have an app that would be interested in using our routing, do check out our API pages.

We are working solidly at present to improve the routing speed/resilience and deal with over-wiggly routes. Improvements will be experienced automatically by API users as we roll these improvements out.

Research-based routing

We are partners in a grant bid to one of the UK Research Councils with some academic colleagues in the other place (Oxford!) for a collaborative project to look at cycling habits and data collection to measure behaviour and impact of cycling interventions. We think there is a lot of scope for adaptive routing – a new field for cycling, and this grant bid is something we’re very excited about. It will require a lot more development work than the basic iPhone app outlined above will include. We are hoping to hear back within the next few weeks and have our fingers crossed!

We’re pleased to announce that CycleStreets has just been awarded a grant of £1,000 from the Co-operative Community Fund, towards boosting our server capacity, which is great news.

We’d like to the thank the Co-op for their support.

This is a significant boost in our forthcoming efforts to scale up the system towards a full release, beyond the current beta, so that very many more new and existing cyclists can have the knowledge of good cycle routes. At present we have a single server which limits resilience.

At present, our main area of work is speeding up considerably the performance of the journey planner and reducing the wigglyness of some routes. Our recent Developer Day identified the way forward on this. Together with increased hosting resilience, we will be in a much stronger position to promote the system and to provide a more solid interface (our API) for forthcoming mobile apps.

Cambridge Sustainable City have also assisted towards our server fund in the grant they awarded us, which is also enormously helpful. Additionally our hosts, Mythic Beasts, kindly provide a mac mini server to host our code/project resources.

Once again, thanks Co-op members!

We are delighted to announce that CycleStreets has been awarded a Cambridge Sustainable City grant, of £3,200, to cover a range of improvements.

Cambridge Sustainable City is an initiative of Cambridge City Council, who are one of a number of Local Authorities who are now linking to CycleStreets from their website transport pages. (We hope that many more will follow!)

Cambridge Sustainable City aims to involve and support the local community in Cambridge’s efforts to address environmental issues. As a means to achieving this, they offer grant funding to local groups and organisations like CycleStreets whose work brings environmental and community benefits.

We are extremely grateful to them for their support.

We will report through the coming 6 months on the improvements that this grant will have facilitated.

Future funding priorities for CycleStreets

We are continuing to apply for a range of grants. Our main funding priority is now to obtain funding for:

• 1-1.5 full-time-equivalent Developer posts for the coming 12-18 months, to push the project forward and to facilitate volunteer help (~ £25k-80k)
• Mobile version(s) of CycleStreets, starting with an iPhone app and a mobile view of the main site (£10-30k?)
• Three years’ funding of a hosting cluster (£15k)

We are also strongly endeavouring to build up a developer team – see our recent blog post about our forthcoming Developer Day. But full-time developer posts are also important, though, as very complex areas like the Journey Planner core algorithms (in particular, the compression system) require weeks of concentrated and solid work, and there are a huge number of improvements and new developments we would like to make, as a result of the enormously helpful feedback we receive from all over the UK now.

If you have suggestions for funding sources, please do let us know.

Also, please consider donating £10 or so yourself – these smaller donations definitely stack up and our helpful to us. CycleStreets’ governing documents include a not-for-profit clause.

We’ve submitted an entry for the GeoVation Awards Programme – view our venture.

A similar idea to what CycleStreets has been implementing was submitted by someone else, at https://challenge.geovation.org.uk/ideas/57 – please do add a rating for that idea. (Requires login first, but it’s fairly easy.)

Thank you very much to the very many of you who told us that you recently voted for our project. We were beaten in our region by a group who enable disadvantaged people to gain access to the internet – an equally worthwhile cause – and we wish them great success with their project.

During the vote we were able to get extra publicity for CycleStreets through facebook, twitter and via an announcement on the CTC‘s national mailing list. Our feedback database is overflowing as a result as the pressure to provide more features competes with answering emails requesting those features (amongst other things).

We shall continue to look for funding from other sources.

If you have not already voted, and you want to support CycleStreets, please vote today to get CycleStreets some much-needed funding!

Thank you to the very many people who have told us they’ve voted for us. Your votes are much appreciated!

Also, check out our recently-added features page!

Simon, lead developer for CycleStreets, has reached the shortlist for the East Anglian section of the TalkTalk Digital Heroes Digital Heroes awards!

If won, this would be worth £5,000 of much-needed funding for CycleStreets, an OpenStreetMap-based project.

Please vote for Simon as our ‘Digital Hero’ if you like CycleStreets, and help us get CycleStreets some funding!

If you know others who have used CycleStreets, please do ask them to vote too ( – but obviously please do not spam).

In terms of funding more generally, we can now accept donations, which will help in particular for server costs. If you have any suggestions for grant-funding bodies to which we could apply, we would also be interested to know – do drop us a line.

Thanks to everyone who has given any help with CycleStreets – and indeed OpenStreetMap – so far.

CycleStreets Ltd includes a not-for-profit clause in our governing documents.

At long last, we can now accept donations!

Donations will help us develop new features, pay for new server equipment to increase the speed of the system, and to improve functionality by paying for non-Free data sources (e.g. the Postcode Address File – see blog posting to follow).

In a month or so we’ll be needing to pay for our server hosting costs, so donations will be useful. We’ve been applying for various small grants to help with this (and are in the running for a funding award – if we get enough votes!) We’re working up to apply for some larger grants also and working on our Local Authority strategy in terms of longer-term sustainability.

A key issue in the longer term for the system will be keeping up improvements to the quality of the routing quality, as well as getting the speed up. This means spending a lot of time on the algorithms, and money on server equipment, as well as making sure we are well-embedded in the cycling community so that we can get feedback – a crucial resource.

As cyclists, we know about the sometimes complex choices that are made on the ground about what direction to take in a cycle route. Details like path widths, traffic issues, surface quality, hills, etc. are all things we are working to factor into the system so that the system mirrors as much as possible the human-decision making processes that go into route choice. Clearly this is complex, hence why CycleStreets doesn’t always get it right (yet!).

We even now take account (where the data exists in OpenStreetMap) of the number of steps on a bridge in the case of areas where a walkable short-cut exists!

Simon has been doing an enormous amount of work on adding new features into our custom routing engine in the last few weeks, and tells me that a torrent of blog posts about these changes will unleashed soon! (He’s currently “in the zone”!)

Donations will give us both financial and moral support so that we can make CycleStreets the leading cycle route-planning service in the UK.

CycleStreets is run on a not-for-profit basis: our company documentation lodged with Companies House when we set up the company in July includes a not-for-profit clause.