CycleStreets blog

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.)

We are pleased to announce that 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 will shortly have a donation form available on the website to help with CycleStreets funding more generally, 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.

P.S. We’ve been working on some routing improvements, including hills recently. Simon will be along on this blog soon to say more about this, in a new series of ‘behind the scenes’ routing blog postings.