We're pleased to announce the launch of our updated iPhone app – version 1.5.
So what's new? Well, it's mainly a tidy-up release (looks prettier!) with a few new features. We've also been getting the app ready so we can add new stuff next.
The itinerary shows route summary details – a much-requested feature
Addition of Shortest route as new route type – for those who like hills (since this mode ignores hills!)
Fewer geolocation requests, so battery lasts longer
Nice new icons throughout (thanks to designer Jamie)
New settings page
Various screens redesigned
Tidier interface for planning
Tile refreshing more frequent, to avoid stale map images
This release has been the hard work of Neil Edwards, who also wrote the great Red Nose Day app earlier this year. Neil's contribution to the CycleStreets project has been tremendous, and his changes set the scene for future improvements.
The top priority feature for our next release will be the ability to switch directly between different route types, e.g. change to fastest route having planned the quietest route. We've added this to our other apps for Android and mobile web (under testing).
The itinerary screen is now a bit more helpful, with the route summary shown and walking bits more obvious:
We love Jamie's new icons for the Photomap (which have also been used in our other apps)! :
Settings and saved routes are also improved – and you can see that Shortest route is a new option now available (though in practice the routes are not as usable, since it's not a very clever form of routing – it really is just the shortest route!) :
Our OpenStreetMap-based routing, for cyclists by cyclists, is now available on the move, complete with full placefinder, tap-to-set and with turn-by-turn directions.
Brought to you by CycleStreets, the UK-based cycle routing people, run on a not-for-profit basis.
Search for CycleStreets in the Android Market, use this link or use this QR code to download it directly:
Plan cycle-friendly routes from A to B anywhere in the UK!
Plans routes through the full street and path network, including Sustrans routes and other networks
Innovative & quick "three taps" system: Set current location, tap the map to set destination, and plan!
Or search for any location in the UK, including full postcode support and local/national placefinder
Choice of map styles (including OpenCycleMap showing contours, and Ordnance Survey Street View)
Turn-by-turn itinerary view
Choose from different types of routing – fastest/quietest/balanced/shortest
Easily switch between route types (e.g. quietest to fastest) having planned a route
Takes account of hills automatically
Plan journeys up to 200 miles (320km) long
Routes automatically saved for later viewing
UK-wide (NB some areas of OpenStreetMap are better than others)
Share your route to Twitter/Facebook easily
Routing for cyclists, by cyclists: your input to OpenStreetMap very welcome
Cycle campaigners will love it too: Photomap photo facility
Need some cycle parking in your area? Take a picture and add it to our Photomap
Obstruction in the way? Report it! Or found an example of great infrastructure? Add it!
Share your photo on Twitter/Facebook easily
Browse the existing library of around 30,000 photos
Full category and caption support
Fully-integrated upload with automatic geolocation
Locations used by campaigners around the UK
Integrated signin facility
Part of the development of this App has been funded by Cycling Scotland.
We’d particularly like to thank our great volunteers who have put in an enormous amount of effort: Jez Higgins (our lead developer), Theodore Hong, Christopher Fraser, Jonathan Gray.
CycleStreets for Android is an open source project, and the code is available on GitHub. If you’d like to get involved with the coding to add new features, do get in touch.
The Bike Hub levy -funded smartphone app, which uses CycleStreets routing, will be highlighted in Sense and the City, an exhibition about being "connected & on the move".
A new exhibition at London Transport Museum will explore how people in the past imagined the London of the future and how new technology will influence city living over the next ten years.
"While the urban landscape will look much the same in 2021 as it does today in terms of buildings, transport infrastructure and even vehicles, our ability to sense and connect to all that the city has to offer is about to be transformed by the convergence of data and communication technologies," said a statement from London Transport Museum.
The Sense and the City exhibition will explore the differences this revolution of connectivity, networking, architecture, town planning and energy will make to our lives over the next ten years. The exhibition has been developed in partnership with the Royal College of Arts.
Alongside high-tech vehicles, the exhibition will feature smartphone navigation, including the Bike Hub cycling-specific satnav.
This app allows cyclists to plan cycle journeys and find bike shops while out and about. Bike Hub app is available for iPhone and Android and is free thanks to the Bike Hub levy.
The app, created to steer cyclists away from busy roads, has a full-on 3D map mode and all of the usual satnav info that drivers are used to, but can route on bike paths, bridleways and the Sustrans National Cycle Network.
Sense and the City will be staged in the CBS Outdoor Gallery at London Transport Museum, Covent Garden Piazza, London and will open in July and run until March 2012.
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Written by Carlton Reid and reproduced with permission.
We're pleased to announce that we're working with Bike Hub to create a new circular (A-A) leisure routing mode for the Bike Hub app for iPhone and Android.
Bike Hub is a joint initiative of the Bicycle Association and the Association of Cycle Traders via the Bike Hub levy scheme. The objective of Bike Hub is to generate funds from within the cycle industry to support the future of cycling in the UK.
The Bike Hub app for iPhone and Android is the 'cycle satnav' for the UK – with a 3D mode for planning and following cycle journeys anywhere in the UK. CycleStreets provides the routing behind the app.
When CycleStreets first went live, we began by offering a choice of A to B routes for the everyday cyclist. In feedback we receive we've frequently been asked to provide support for routes that go through intermediate points. We've meshed these requests with Bike Hub's desire to help people discover attractive cycle routes where they live.
The result will add a leisure routing mode to the app that can suggest circular routes or construct a circular route through several places of interest. On mobile this will be exclusive to the Bike Hub app. Leisure routes will be available on the main CycleStreets website so that they can be transferred to the app.
Together with other funds we have recently raised as part of our funding drive, this work should enable us to take on a developer to enhance the routing in various ways. We'll shortly be hiring – stay tuned!
We're pleased to announce that we are working with Cycling Scotland to enhance cycle journey planning in Scotland!
Cycling Scotland, the organisation charged with getting more Scots on their bikes, runs a range of initiatives such as Bikeability Scotland, the freshnlo Pedal for Scotland bike ride, cycle instructor training and more. They are keen to provide cycle journey planning – to help remove a key barrier that people face when starting cycling or when they move into a new area.
As part of their journey planning activity, Cycling Scotland are extremely keen to motivate local community groups to map their area into OpenStreetMap, which forms the heart of CycleStreets' journey planner. Although there are areas like Edinburgh which have very high-quality mapping, thanks to the great work of OpenStreetMap volunteers there, other areas of the country are not so well-covered.
To help, we will be creating resources to help local communities with this mapping activity. Principally, this will involve creation of a user-friendly guide which introduces OpenStreetMap, explains how we use it, how people can collect data, and importantly outline the key things that improve the quality of cycle routing. (We hope this guide will also be of wider use to the OpenStreetMap community elsewhere, too, even though it will of course be tailored for Scotland.)
Alongside this work, we'll be creating a customised journey planner for Cycling Scotland, to be hosted on their website. This will benefit, thanks to a grant from them, from the introduction of more advanced routing attributes in our journey planner engine. By encouraging people to collect more detail about the cycling environment in their area, this will improve further the quality of our routing. Naturally, this will all be explained in the user-friendly guide for collectors.
Cycling Scotland are also supporting us to make our routing available more widely on different types of mobile phones, so that it is as accessible as possible.
We think this model of helping get more people cycle by engaging local communities and building on existing work is a brilliant model.
We are looking forward to undertaking these activities in partnership with Cycling Scotland, and will report in coming months as each part is completed and made available.
OpenCycleMap in Scotland - cc-by-sa OpenStreetMap contributors
Today is our second birthday – CycleStreets was launched on 20th March 2009.
The last year has seen a huge amount of development work, leading to new features, speed improvements, and more. However, the next six months will be even busier as the project really ramps up!
In the first year, CycleStreets planned 67,000 routes. In our second year, around 437,000 routes have been planned, and the rate of increase continues to climb. By November we had planned enough routes to cycle to the moon ten times, and in February, we reached the milestone of half a million journeys planned.
A major challenge we faced a year ago was the technical challenge of generating the routes fast enough.
A year ago, CycleStreets used a routing engine written in PHP (!) that we created for the Cambridge-only predecessor of CycleStreets – the Cambridge Cycling Campaign journey planner. It was slow, taking half a minute to plan a route across London, and taking up most of the system resources. Effectively, it was the wrong technology and didn't scale to UK-wide routing.
We held our first Developer Day, which lead to very productive discussions about the routing engine and how we could provide routes to users of the site faster. A friend of the project, George, wrote us a new engine (using Python) which lead to a massive speed-up. Then Robin, another volunteer, took the Python engine and created an even faster version in C++. This has been in place for most of the year and has quietly sat at the heart of the system, planning routes in a few GB of RAM while barely challenging the processor.
The work on the routing engine meant that we have been able continually to increase the maximum planning distance, which is now 200 miles (320km), which is well above a day's cycling! The development version of the system can even now do Dover to Cape Wrath!
Improving the routing speed was a key requirement for mobile apps, several of which signed up to use our routing through the year. These include the leading app for the London cycle hire scheme – London Cycle: Maps & Routes, plus two other excellent 'boris-bike' apps, the briliant and world-first 3D bike satnav app, Bike Hub, BikeRoute for Android and, of course, our own CycleStreets for iPhone app.
Our own iPhone app was made possible thanks to two grants we successfully applied for.
Our Android app is nearing completion, and like the iPhone app is being developed as an open source project. Thanks to our mobile developers for their brilliant work on these.
Through the year we have given various presentations and got involved with various social enterprise -related activities., such as WhereCamp EU, CamTechNet, Cambridge Geek Night and Net2Camb amongst others. These events lead to interesting discussions and also resulted in useful new contacts, such as people helping out with our mobile apps.
It was a particular plesure to give a presentation to Net2Camb as it gave us the opportunity to speak about the challenges faced by us as a not-for-profit social enterprise, rather than purely talking about technical challenges.
We have launched a funding drive for £130k to raise funds for two full-time developers. Such funds would enable the project to move forward much more quickly.
The DfT has this year been collecting cycling data which we are keen to see added to OpenStreetMap. We have since had informal discussions with Cycling England about use of the data, and how conversion of the data might be undertaken and at what cost. Discussions have been positive, and we feel this data would improve the quality of routes that we can deliver to users.
Over the year, more and more governmental bodies have been linking to us. For instance, in April, Cycling Scotland linked to us, and we are keen to work with them to help motivate people to improve OpenStreetMap data in Scotland. Others, including some of the Cycling Demonstration Towns like Chester and Lancaster now link to CycleStreets, and we have just sent a new brochure to councils around England.
Increasing the flexibility of the CycleStreets platform has been an ongoing priority.
The year has also seen a few developments on the Photomap. This is an area we would like to do much more on, as explained in our GeoVation bid for which we have now been shortlisted.
We created, under contract for Cambridgeshire County Council, a site called 'Cycling Sorted' to help manage the shortage of cycle parking in that area. We are keen to create similar sites for other Local Authorities. We have also created a similar system to support the great work of London Cycling Campaign.
OpenStreetMap is the backbone of our project, and we have been pleased to promote OSM and encourage more mapping for it. Over the summer we helped obtain a database of all the bike shops in the UK, for use in OSM, from the Association of Cycle Traders. Much of this has been merged into OSM, but more needs to be done to complete this crowd-sourcing exercise.
CycleStreets' use of open data saw it being featured on the front page of the government's new data website – data.gov.uk.
Routing quality work, however, remains our highest priority. Our aim is to provide the highest quality routing possible for cycling, using our knowledge as cyclists. Various improvements have been made recently, and we are currently working on new routing attributes and reducing the wigglyness of some routes, which is proving a difficult problem to solve with limited hardware resources.
Simon and Martin, lead developers, would like to thank a range of people who have helped out in various ways, such as Andy, Shaun and David from OpenStreetMap, George and Robin for work on the routing engine, huge support from Chris in Edinburgh, George from Camden, our mobile developers – Alan, Neil, Jez, Theodore, Christopher and Jonathan, advice and a free dev server from our brilliant web hosts Mythic Beasts, our designer Ayesha, Jeremy for occasional advice on business matters, support from key individuals at the CTC, LCC and Cycle Nation plus others in our stakeholder group, Carlton and Bike Hub, helpful ideas and data from cycle campaign groups around the UK, and of course the amazing community of OpenStreetMap contributors whose mapping makes everything possible.
Lastly, we would like to thank our users, whose cycling needs provide us with the inspiration to keep going, and who provide us with much feedback and many great ideas.
We're pleased to announce that the journey planning limit has been doubled to 200 miles (320km). This is well over a day's cycling!
Mobile users should bear in mind that long journeys result in more data being sent over the wire so a slower response should be expected. The generation of the route and its metadata naturally also takes a little longer.
The UK Bike Hub levy released a free iPhone bicycle journey planning app in October, using CycleStreets routing. This was later upgraded to become the world's first vibrate & voice cycle satnav. Bike Hub funds have now enabled the creation of an app for Android phones. This is also free, paid for by UK bicycle suppliers and bike shops.
The iPhone version of the Bike Hub app has had it for a couple of months and now the Android app gets it too: 3D satnav functionality.
The Bike Hub Android app is published under the Travel & Local category in the Android Market Place.
The journey planner supports multiple waypoints. It allows for the saving of 'favourites' and has a 'More' section with articles on the Cycle to Work scheme, the law pertaining to cycling, and loads of quotes about cycling and bicycles. The app size is 3.4mb. Some Android phones have a small onboard memory capacity so the option to save to SD card overcomes this. It's a facility that is set in the app package. Not all phones support this.
The Bike Hub Android and iPhone apps use cycle-specific routing from Cyclestreets with fast/balanced/quiet routes plotted on the OpenCycleMap via the community-developed OpenStreetMap.
Here are some screenshots of the new app! Click to make bigger.
This is a guest post from Carlton Reid, executive editor of BikeBiz.com and the editor of BikeHub.co.uk, who commissioned and helped designed the great new Bike Hub app which uses our routing! Following on from his first guest post, he writes about version 2.0 of the BikeHub satnav & bikeshop-finder iPhone app.
I'm a Mac addict so am conflicted when I here use a phrase popularised by Microsoft but it's true, I do eat my own dogfood.
I use the product I made. Or, more accurately, the product I commissioned. The Bike Hub app was coded by Tinderhouse of Kent and is given away free on iTunes thanks to the UK bicycle industry's levy, Bike Hub.
The app started life as a journey planner (and bike shop finder) but Version 2.0 turned it into a turn-by-turn satnav, with voice directions and vibration alerts.
It's all well and good me using the app in my home town of Newcastle but that's no real test, that's merely fun. The real test was to use it in a place I'm unfamiliar with. Earlier this week I was in Coventry with my folding bike, researching the hidden history of late 19th Century cyclists and their role in creating better roads.
I had to get from out in the sticks through to the University of Warwick and then from there to a car showroom in Coventry before finally reaching the train station.
There's no handlebar holder for the iPhone 4 (yet, there's one due from Dahon any day now) so I was going to have to rely on the voice and vibrate alerts. With an earbud in one ear I could listen to the synthetic voice, and still be aware of noises around me.
On roads, this worked fine. The satnav voice directed me to take lots of turns so I could stay away from Coventry's murderous dual carriageways. But when it came to being directed on bike paths, I had to stop and use visual guidance from the 3D map. When the app told me to go 'straight on' in my ear, I could see from the map that what it meant was divert to the cycle path. When cycle paths are well marked this system worked well but in Coventry town centre there are quite a few cycle underpasses to navigate and without looking at the 3D map I would have been flummoxed by using voice alone: there were too many un-named cut-throughs to navigate. Roads all have names; Sustrans' National Cycle Routes are listed by NCN#; but short cuts are denoted merely by 'link to'. Without a map to look at (and even with a map to look at) finding your way from a road via the app's 'link to' message can be confusing.
But when it works well, the satnav functionality works brilliantly. I was guided through short-cuts on the car-strangled campus of the University of Warwick and, once into Coventry, guided on Sustrans NCN routes, including bike bridges over nasty looking dual carriageways. Appropriately, I was guided past the statue of James Starley, one of the founding fathers of the UK bicycle industry, uncle of JK Starley, the designer of the Rover Safety bicycle, direct forerunner to the modern bicycle.
This status isn't listed on OpenStreetMap. I shall add it.
The document has not yet been fully checked, and a few missing API call examples (though they just mirror what's online) need to be added, but it is 99% done now.
Please let us have any comments on things that are not clear or where implementation would be ambiguous.
As stressed in the foreword, the spec is merely a template for creative work, not an exact blueprint for implementation, since other platforms will do things differently and the existing app needs changes anyway.
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