CycleStreets blog

Cycle Cambridge, the cycling section of Cambridgeshire County Council has issued a great new edition of its 'Get Pedalling' publication (Autumn/Winter 2010/11 issue).

It features CycleStreets and our iPhone app, alongside updates on cycling schemes in Cambridgeshire.

We’re helping get Cycling Sorted, thanks to a new site we’ve created for Cambridgeshire County Council which has recently been launched!

Cycling Sorted is a project run by the Cycle Cambridge team at Cambridgeshire County Council to find out where you would like to make improvements to cycling facilities in Cambridge and the surrounding villages, in terms of new cycle parking and removing on-route obstructions.

How does it work?

The site allows members of the public (including cycle campaigners) to:

• easily request and identify where you think additional cycle parking is needed
• flag up obstructions on cycle routes and infrastructure.

While not everything requested can realistically be done, it’s an easy way to collect and prioritise the information from the people who know the area best – you!

Photos that have already been added to the CycleStreets Photomap will have been picked up, so there’s no need to re-enter those.

So if you have a suggestion for where cycle parking could be added, or would like obstructions removed, go and help get Cycling Sorted, at www.cyclingsorted.org to let Cambridgeshire County Council know!

What’s unique about Cycling Sorted?

There are three key differences with Cycling Sorted compared to other great initiatives like FixMyStreet and Fill That Hole:

• Firstly, it’s intended for both absent infrastructure, i.e. desired infrastructure (e.g. lack of cycle parking) as well as reporting problems with existing infrastructure;
• Secondly, it is intended to enable the Council to deal easily with prioritisation of problems, rather than just addressing them as they come in;
• Lastly, it is dedicated to cycling infrastructure only.

The prioritisation system

There is a backend prioritisation system to which the Local Authority has access.

This part of the system enables prioritisation of each area by scoring and adding a note:

• A score for desirability
• A score for feasibility
• Notes about progress
• And a response to the public, which will appear later on www.cyclingsorted.org.

Prioritisation is worked through in submission order or by browsing a map and clicking on a button to edit all the suggestions in the area:

For instance, a city centre area which is desperately short of cycle parking might get 9/10 for desirability, but 2/10 for feasibility due to lack of space (realistically). Thus its score would be 18. By contrast, an area outside a row of shops on, say, Hills Road in Cambridge (a reasonably wide road with lots of shops) is fairly desirable (perhaps 8/10) as well as very achievable due to the wider pavements and side-roads (8/10). So in this hypothetical example, it would get a score of 64.

There is then a screen where the scored locations are listed in order (highest score first, i.e. most desirable and achievable), and these are then worked through for political approval and commissioning with contractors.

How about other areas of the country?

If your Local Authority would also be interested in a similar site for asking the public for locations needing improvement, and a way to prioritise these, do get in touch with us. We are keen to take on work to generalise the system for other areas.

PS We’re also working on a project on a similar theme for London … more news soon!

We've received several enquiries from Local Authorities recently about using CycleStreets in some way.

We're busy creating a set of pages, including a demo site, for Local Authorities to explain various options available to them, including:

• Hosted versions of CycleStreets within the Council house style
• Simply linking to us (which of course is free, and will always remain so!)
• Customised routing modes, perhaps emphasising particular routes
• Websites to obtain information from the public about where new cycle parking and other infrastructure is needed (e.g. cyclingsorted.org)
• Use within multi-modal journey planners

We hope to have these pages available soon. (We're a little behind schedule on this due to booked holidays at a time of finishing off a number of grant-funded/consultancy projects.)

CycleStreets' use of open data, in the form of the excellent OpenStreetMap is, we feel, very much in line with the government's objectives: low-cost, use of open data, and good embeddedness with the community.

The information we're assembling will also explain about getting Local Authority routes into OpenStreetMap (OSM), so that they appear on the OSM cartographic maps as well as used within the routing. There are various resources on the OpenStreetMap Wiki which we want to pull together in a format more suitable to the specific needs of Local Authorities. Issues relating to compatibility with Ordnance Survey data will be covered also.

In the meanwhile, we encourage Local Authorities to link to their area's version of CycleStreets, as others are now doing.

Please drop us a line if you'd like us to notify when the new information is available.

We're really pleased to see that Cycling Scotland are now linking to Scotland CycleStreets from their front page!

It was the Scottish Government’s Sustainable Transport section who funded the initial development of Edinburgh CycleStreets (in the form of a small seed grant arranged by Chris Hill of Changing Pace).

We'd like to take this opportunity to thank Cycling Scotland and Changing Pace again for their support.

We are particularly proud to be the first (and, as far as we are aware, the only) cycle journey planning system to take hills into account – something we know our Scottish friends are particularly pleased to see about!

Update: We're informed that Dundee has a route planner that includes hills – see the comments!