CycleStreets blog

CycleStreets, the cycle journey planning people, will this year be publishing a photo a day – from the CycleStreets Photomap containing over 25,000 cycling-related photos submitted by our users.

Either by checking the front page of the site, or by following the @CycleStreets channel on Twitter, people will get our selection of the best photo taken that day in previous years.

The CycleStreets Photomap is a brilliant resource for cycle campaigners – and one which people can contribute to, either via the website or via the CycleStreets iPhone app (Android and mobile HTML versions are being worked on too).

As well as a range of quirky, interesting and unusual pictures, there are masses of pictures of good and bad infrastructure that campaigning groups around the country will find useful. Groups like Cambridge Cycling Campaign have often found the resource immensely useful, as it has enabled examples of best practice to be shared, and evidence of problems to be published so that they can be drawn to the attention of the authorities.

Martin, one of the people developing the CycleStreets site, said:

"We hope to surprise people daily with a range of interesting, useful and sometimes downright quirky images. Tune in to our twitter channel to discover something new each day. And if you're quick, photos added on the day may get picked as the best one."

All the pictures have been contributed by users of the site – and naturally they retain rights to the photos, though many are public domain or Share-Alike, making them re-usable for fellow campaigners. To add a photo, just click on the link at www.cyclestreets.net/photomap and upload away! Photos can also be imported from Flickr, and the CycleStreets iPhone app lets you upload on-street when you come across a problem needing fixing – or something unusual.

CycleStreets is also seeking funding through our Funding Drive to improve the Photomap to make it as useful and user-friendly as possible.

Here's a selection of photos from the Photomap. Check our front page or tune into our Twitter channel for a new one each day!

Click on each photo to view details and attribution

London Cycling Campaign's www.cycleparking4london.org.uk website, which we helped create, is continuing to see requests for new cycle parking locations pouring in.

The site enables members of the public to submit suggestions of places needing cycle parking, which will then be used by local campaigners.

As well as going to the main site itself, you can use the CycleStreets iPhone app (and soon our Android app) to add locations where cycle parking is needed or is deficient in some way:

The last two screenshots show the process of adding a photo.

For those in Cambridgeshire, you can go to www.CyclingSorted.org which is a site we created for Cambridgeshire County Council.

We're proud to announce the launch of a website we helped create for London Cycling Campaign:

www.cycleparking4london.org.uk

specifically, the 'suggest a location' page. The design of the site and other content is by LCC itself.

The site enables members of the public to submit suggestions of places needing cycle parking, which will then be used by local campaigners. Some 500 locations have already been submitted!

The site is very much along the same lines as www.CyclingSorted.org which we created for Cambridgeshire County Council.

We're keen to do similar sites for Local Authorities around the country, if funding is available.

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!

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 and design changes 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

When adding a photo and associated comment to our Photomap, your username is now shown on the page.

This applies to new contributions added from today onwards.

For existing photos, contributors have been notified that this change will be applied to those images on 19th September (i.e. one month from today).

We are happy to change usernames or to split groups of photos into different usernames if wanted by users.

This change effectively brings CycleStreets into line with most other sites like YouTube, Flickr and others, which allow user contributions. Most photos have the CC-BY-SA license, which basically allows others to re-use the photo, but only if attributed. But at present there is no way of attributing.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us. As contributors to the system ourselves, user privacy is a very important concern to us.

We're gradually rolling out changes to the Photomap as a result of a large code-cleanup that is taking place behind the scenes, and will report on these changes here soon!

Our mobile app is nearing completion. Unfortunately the schedule slipped by a month as we were keen to complete our backend work to ensure the routing was fast enough to support it, something that is now in place. Also, we've been held up slightly by EXIF-related issues (so that uploaded photos get the correct position even if they were taken a while ago).

Here are screenshots from the latest work in progress, with a few bug fixes due to be implemented by mid-August before we submit to Apple.

Thanks to everyone who has offered to be a beta-tester. We'll be in touch soon – sorry for not acknowledging each offer individually yet!

We've lots of ideas for new features to go in a future release after the initial release. We'd like to create a team of two or three volunteers to work on the app on an ongoing basis. If you'd be interested, please do get in touch.

Planning a route:

Following a route:

Browsing the Photomap:

Adding photos to the Photomap:

Settings and other pages:

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!

Short video clips can now be added to the photomap.

Here’s an example of Simon getting his feet wet on the flooded section of the public bridleway next to the Cambridgeshire busway.

Videos can be up to 50 MB in size, and may include sound. Formats currently supported are MOV, AVI, WMV and FLV.

They are converted to a low resolution flash format, and a still from the first frame of the video is used for the image in the photomap.

http://www.cyclestreets.net/photomap/add/video.html

Internet Explorer 8 has a useful new feature called ‘Accelerators‘. We’ve created an Accelerator for the CycleStreets photomap search. It basically gives you a one-click search for photos for a given bit of text.

To get our Accelerator for IE8, go to our Search page, click on the blue install button.
Then confirm, ideally clicking on the tickbox to make this appear more clearly:

So now it’s installed, how do I use it?

Just highlight some text on a webpage, e.g. ‘potholes’, and a little blue button will appear. Then just click on the CycleStreets entry:

and you’ll then get photos for what you highlighted:

Enjoy!

Posted by Martin (a Google Chrome fan!)