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
CPRE (The Campaign to Protect Rural England) work actively on transport matters amongst other issues around the UK.
They have added their support:
"The Campaign to Protect Rural England is delighted to be able to support the CycleStreets GeoVation Challenge bid. We have been working with local communities and parish councils to increase travel options in rural areas as part of our Transport Toolkit project, which was featured in the Department for Transport's Local Transport White Paper earlier this year. Through this work we have found there is a real need for new on-line collaboration tools to help improve conditions for cycling. We believe these innovative proposals would be a huge step forward not just for cycling campaign groups but for others engaged at the local level who seek to improve the range of sustainable travel choices."
- Ralph Smyth, Senior Transport Campaigner, CPRE
Also, the creator of the heavily-used OpenCycleMap map, Andy Allan, has written on his blog about "The Problem of Cycle Complaining" and supporting our bid.
He describes our bid as "a hugely important step forward for all cycle campaigning groups". He hits the nail on the head, recognising the same problems that we and other groups around the country have found, as this extract explains:
If a cycle group want to approach a council to convert one-way roads into two-way, they are unlikely to have the traffic simulations to show the five most useful changes. There’s just a huge gulf in tools and technologies available to each side, so when the only way things work is for one side to suggest and the other to accept/refuse, it’s easier to see where so much reactionary complaining comes from.
Enter the guys behind CycleStreets, with their “Helping campaigners campaign” proposal. You can read it for yourself, but in summary is a web-based tool to track, manage and develop solutions to infrastructure problems facing cyclists. While it’s not a panacea for everything I’ve discussed, I think it’s a hugely important step forward for all cycle campaigning groups. Their proposal has been short-listed for the GeoVation awards finals in two weeks’ time and I wish them the best of luck, the funding from that would really kick things off. If you want to show your support then go for it, through your blogs, twitter or however you see fit. Even if they don’t manage the grand prize I hope to see their proposals come to fruition in the near future, especially given their track record of getting things done. I hope to get the opportunity to help their ideas see the light of day – it will be an excellent tool to help turn cycle complaining into the results we want to see.
CPRE and Andy Allan of OpenCycleMap join other supporters of the bid:
Cyclenation, the national federation of cycle campaign groups
If you're free on 4th May, we'd love you to come to the GeoVation Showcase to support us (and vote for us for the additional Community Prize!). It's a daytime event on the south coast, so we're aware it may not be easy for people to come to, but do come should you happen to be free. There are a number of other interesting projects, so it will be a good chance to hear about them and mingle and network with other innovators.
A Cambridge-based project to improve cycling around the Britain has reached the finals of a national funding contest, GeoVation, run by the Ordnance Survey. GeoVation aims to combine Geography and Innovation to help fund ideas which will help improve transport of various kinds.
The bid by Cambridge-based CycleStreets, who run the UK-wide cycle journey planner website, has reached the final 10 projects aiming to improve transport in Britain. Over 150 entries were initially submitted, and CycleStreets have succeeded in the initial shortlisting stage and a subsequent workshop event.
The 'Dragon's Den' -style event to select the winning projects will be held on 4th May at the Ordnance Survey's new eco-friendly headquarters in Southampton. This 'GeoVation Showcase' event will select around five winners, who will share a bounty of £150,000, to enable the projects to be developed.
CycleStreets' proposal is for a web-based system to improve the effectiveness of cycling advocacy groups around the UK. These groups aim to get more people on their bikes, by encouraging local councils to create safer and more convenient conditions for cycling. It is designed to help volunteers who care passionately about improving cycling to work together as effectively as possible.
CycleStreets' proposal has the backing of both of the national cycling campaign bodies and a range of groups around the UK, including Cambridge Cycling Campaign. For instance, CTC – the national cyclists' organisation said:
"A webtool for cyclists to help local councils spend their cycling budgets cost-effectively would be a wonderful 'big society' venture, that could yield huge benefits for our health and that of our streets, communities and the environment."
CycleStreets' idea will make use of a variety of information sources, including the Ordnance Survey's boundary and postcode data, collision and planning application information, and OpenStreetMap data.
Dr Chris Parker, GeoVation Co-ordinator at Ordnance Survey, said:
"There are huge and exciting opportunities for geography to be harnessed to help us all travel in a smarter, more sustainable way, as all our finalists have clearly demonstrated. We're looking forward to seeing the CycleStreets pitch and wish them the best of luck."
Notes for editors:
Information about GeoVation, and the finalists – including CycleStreets' proposal – can be found online at http://www.geovation.org.uk/.
CycleStreets is a not-for-profit company based in Cambridge, and was created as an off-shoot of Cambridge Cycling Campaign.
CycleStreets runs the UK-wide Cycle journey planner and Photomap at www.cyclestreets.net , which has had over 640,000 journeys planned. Users can plan cycle-friendly routes from A-B, and will get three options – a quietest, fastest and balanced route option. The Photomap enables people to add photos of cycling-related problems and good practice to the map.
Over the last year and half, the DfT has been collecting cycling data for use in its TransportDirect portal.
We received today a letter from Norman Baker MP confirming that it is the DfT's intention to open this dataset, in line with the new government's principles on transparency. We think this is an excellent development. It confirms earlier discussions we held with members of the former Cycling England.
It is our understanding that the data is currently referenced from the Ordnance Survey's ITN dataset. This means it would, if kept in raw format, be useless to anyone without access to an expensive ITN license, and even then could be encumbered. However, Norman Baker sensibly writes:
"We recognise that the data in its current form is subject to licenses and so are working towards translating the data into a format that is more easily used by the developer and OpenStreetMap community."
This is good as it recognises that releasing a dataset without it being referenced against open (lat/lon) attributes would be open data only in name rather than in spirit. Using the Open Government License should ensure that it can be merged into OpenStreetMap, whose dataset has proven its worth for UK-wide cycle journey planning purposes.
The OpenStreetMap community is rightly wary of mass imports of data. In order to make use of this data, we have stressed that some tool development would be needed to enable it to be manually 'pulled across' via visual inspection if it is to be used, which we've been talking to Andy about.
We are extremely keen to help the DfT with this whole process, and discussions have been positive. We hope to report further on this soon. It would ensure the government can achieve greater taxpayer value for the data, and thereby enable us and others to give additional confidence to people considering starting cycling or wanting safer routes. Getting the data into OSM will also mean that the data is a living dataset that is kept updated.
As a sidenote, Norman Baker seems to be on a roll with sensible thinking. It is recently reported that he has refused to tow to the unquestioning view of helmet-wearing, but instead has weighed up the evidence himself and decided not to on a personal basis. This reflects best-practice cycle training: that risks should be assessed according to circumstances, and therefore the choice of whether to use a helmet is an individual one. He's also requested people to come forward with examples of unnecessary and annoying announcements on public transport – truly fresh thinking!
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.
The proposal is for an extensive suite of tools that will really help cycling campaigners around the UK – people who are already enthused – to be more effective in their work. It will build on the basic reporting facility in our Photomap and its fleldgling categorisation system.
These groups – large and small, national and local, are the people on the ground who work make cycling better. They're already enthused, so we need to give them as much support as possible.
However, there's a way to go yet – firstly we are invited to develop the idea at the GeoVation Camp, 25 – 27 March. The best ideas, hopefully including ours(!) will then go forward to the final pitching session, the GeoVation Showcase, on May 4th.
Support for our bid
We're pleased to say that the bid now has the support of both of the national cycle campaigning organisations as well as a number of the most active local groups, including the biggest, London Cycling Campaign:
Cyclenation, the national federation of cycle campaign groups
CTC, the national cyclists’ organisation
Cambridge Cycling Campaign
London Cycling Campaign
Richmond Cycling Campaign
Bristol
Pedals (Nottingham Cycling Campaign)
Dublin Cycling Campaign
Spokes – the Lothian Cycle Campaign
Spokes (East Kent Cycle Campaign)
Loughborough & District Cycle Users' Campaign
Push Bikes, the Birmingham Cycling Campaign
CycleSheffield
all of whom have written quotes of support. Please let us know if you would like to add your group to the list.
How would it work, in brief?
Cyclists would pinpoint problems (points/lines) on a map, e.g. lack of cycle parking, hostile roads, absence of needed route, poor quality cycling conditions, etc., with a photo if available. Planning applications could also appear automatically where the data is available.
(Mobile apps can also post to the database using the existing infrastructure to enable this.)
Others can publicly comment on each submission and add local knowledge. Examples of best practice elsewhere in the system can be pulled in (e.g. as example solutions).
A 'heat map' of problem areas would start to develop, together with per-point indications of status of a problem
Each location effectively becomes an entry in both the map and in a forum-style view
Campaign group members would log in to their group's area of the website, and would have drag-and-drop -style tools to prioritise and discuss the locations. Locations could also be grouped together, e.g. so that multiple issues arising from one development are treated most effectively.
Documents, e-mails and web references can be 'attached' to a particular issue so that all information relating to one issue is in one place.
Cyclists in each area would also be encouraged to register and to 'draw on the map' their typical journeys (helped by the CycleStreets journey planner), so that they can then be alerted to issues and campaigns along those routes
As an issue progresses in terms of external campaigning, it is updated and 'published' in various ways via the site
Prioritised lists can be 'pushed out' to Local Authority contacts, or they can be invited to join the conversation
When issues are finally resolved these would be marked as such, also publicising the work of the group concerned
Where routes in the CycleStreets journey planner are planned that pass through improved areas, the work of the group would be publicised!
The whole system would need to be extremely user-friendly, so that it gets the widest possible usage and actively engages people without technical skills.
Thanks to the brilliant work of Andy Allan, Richard Fairhurst, Tom Hughes, Dave Stubbs, Matt Amos and others, who have worked on OpenStreetMap's new 'Potlatch 2' editor, we've now been able to add an integrated data editor to the CycleStreets site.
We'll be customising the installation and integrating it more with existing pages and tools within the CycleStreets website in coming weeks.
Changes you make to the data go into the OpenStreetMap database directly. We then import that data every week or so.
(In other words, changes you make via our editing page don't reflect the routing immediately, but take up to a week. We're working to reduce that down, ideally towards a daily import now that we have more powerful server hardware thanks to your donations and some grants!)
The work to integrate Potlatch 2 into the site was extremely easy – it's clear that Andy et al have worked very hard to make that as simple as possible. (In fact, it was refreshing to find that integrating an external piece of software was straightforward rather than the usual problematic task it can often be!)
We'd also like to thank Tom Chance, whose excellent introductoryguides we adapted, with his kind permission.
We really enjoyed the January Net2Camb Meetup event, where one of our lead developers, Martin, gave a talk 'Our Story'. Thanks to Claire for organising the event and everyone who came!
It was particularly enjoyable as it was a rare opportunity to talk about the business and competition aspects of CycleStreets, about the challenges we face, and the future opportunities for the project.
We were also pleased that a couple of people came forward as new volunteers!
We were delighted to discover today that CycleStreets is featured as the default front page item on the government's relaunched data.gov.uk website!
CycleStreets uses four main open datasets:
OpenStreetMap, consisting of data collected by people all around the UK to make a brilliant and versatile map dataset (this is not a government dataset though!)
OS Code-Point Open, the Ordnance Survey's dataset of all the millions of postcodes around the UK
SRTM, the NASA dataset which has the heights of every location on the earth, enabling us to take hills/descents into account
We also use the free OS boundary data for some new uses gradually being unveiled
We're really pleased to see the work of thousands of cyclists and others around the UK recognised through this feature.
As one commenter on the data.gov.uk website notes, however:
"It would be good if CycleStreets got UK Government money/co-operation."
We are continuing to try to obtain funding as part of our new Funding drive, to raise £90k to facilitate much faster development of CycleStreets over the coming 18 months.
We're really thrilled by the response to our iPhone app and the other apps using our routing.
What is also just as pleasing is seeing people discovering OpenStreetMap as a result, and saying that they're interested in getting involved. OpenStreetMap is the brilliant open data map that provides the data that CycleStreets and other projects use.
For those not familiar with OpenStreetMap: It's basically like a 'Wikipedia of maps' – anyone can contribute to it, and each such contribution is a valuable addition that adds to the collective knowledge of what exists, where. CycleStreets (and others) regularly take this data and import it into a compressed format that we then use to route over. We apply subjective scoring over this objective data in order to route you from A-B. Mobile apps springing up basically work by sending details of the required journey (i.e. start/finish points and type of journey, e.g. quiestest/fastest) to our service, and our data endpoint (called an 'API') returns the route solution.
So how can people get involved?
Starting with the most easy thing, a good way to start is by adding Points Of Interest (POIs) to the map. For instance, if a bike shop or a spot for cycle parking isn't present, you can go to the map and add it.
We've written a guide on How to add a bike shop to OpenStreetMap. Once you're used to the (currently) slightly quirky interface, it's very easy and addictive. And our friends in OpenStreetMap are busy working on a new-generation editing system (called Potlatch 2) which will make things even easier.
Another way of editing information in OpenStreetMap is MapZen, which is also available on iPhone. It certainly makes it nice and easy to add information to the map, especially on the move.
If you have a GPS device you can also go out mapping! Basically this involves cycling/walking around and obtaining a GPS trace from where you go, and recording on your journey things like street names, points of interest, information about the street itself (which is very important for cycle routing!) and so on. When you get home, you can use a tool such as JOSM (the Java OpenStreetMap editor) to straighten out the GPS traces, to enter the metadata you've collected, and then finally upload it to OpenStreetMap itself.
The OpenStreetMap Wiki is the gold mine of information about OSM and how you can take part. Over 300,000 people around the world already are involved, and we hope you'll join them.
Be warned, though, mapping is addictive!
We also feed back problems in the data, highlighted in route feedback we get, back into OpenStreetMap. We always need volunteers for this, and we are working on a better system for making this route feedback more accessible to people (currently our backend is rather poor).
Got some existing data?
Local Authorities and others may have existing data that they'd like to see CycleStreets use. To do this, they need to get this data into OpenStreetMap, not CycleStreets itself, so that everybody benefits.
A key issue is confirmation that other parties such as the Ordnance Survey do not have rights in the data. Secondly, you need to agree to the OpenStreetMap license, which basically gives other people the right to use the data, to share it, and to modify it. Of course, you also have the right to do these things with the modified data too.
The second issue is preparing the data in a suitable format. OpenStreetMap is a community of volunteers, and are quite rightly is wary of mass imports of data, because they often duplicate existing data that people have painstakingly collected on the ground, and such datasets are not always as up-to-date as a real survey. However, such data can be extremely useful as a prompt for where physical attributes exist, so that people can then pull across data from your dataset into the live OpenStreetMap data after manual observation.
An example of this is the new Bike Shop Locator tool which OSMers Shaun and Andy have written. This contains a great dataset of the 2,500+ independent bike shops in the UK. The tool provides a way of merging in this data, and we encourage people to do so, so that OpenStreetMap is as full-featured as possible.
Only this week, CycleStreets has received two offers of datasets, which we will respond to positively and refer to our OSM contacts. We are also seeking funding to channel money into creation/maintenance of tools for OpenStreetMap that enable such observational merging to be done more effortlessly.
If you have cycling-related data that you'd like to see included in OpenStreetMap – and therefore be used by CycleStreets – please do contact us and we can put you in touch with suitable people to help make things happen.
Journey planner
Photomap
Mobile
Blog
Blog RSS feed
How would it work, in brief?
