CycleStreets blog

CycleStreets, the UK-wide cycle journey planner website, today reached a new milestone: a third of a million cycle journeys planned. Route 333,333 was a typical cross-city route, in Cambridge.

The 333,333 journeys amounts to 3.85 million km of route planning – that's an awful lot of cycling!

This is also the equivalent of cycling to the moon ten times, or cycling round the earth almost 100 times.

CycleStreets is an independent project created by two cycling web-developers based in Cambridge. It uses the excellent data in OpenStreetMap which is collected by thousands of people all around the UK, creating the 'Wikipedia of maps'. Cyclists – and anyone else – can get involved by adding information to www.openstreetmap.org. CycleStreets is truly a project for cyclists, by cyclists.

Planning a cycle route is quick and easy with CycleStreets. Just go to www.cyclestreets.net, search / click on a start point and finish point, and hit the 'Plan route' button. A map and detailed journey plan is given.

People can also plan a journey on the move. A free mobile phone version of CycleStreets is available at www.cyclestreets.net/mobile – currently for iPhone, but Android and other versions are in the works. A range of other apps, including great apps from Bike Hub (including a bikeshop finder), Cycle Hire app, London Cycle, and London Bike App also make use of CycleStreets routing – with other app-makers coming on board to add cycle-friendly routing to their apps.

We're helping get new cyclists on their bikes. Said one user:

"Brilliant facility. I have just started cycling to work and found it very useful for planning routes and trying them out."

CycleStreets' 'Routemaster', Simon Nuttall explains the project's roots:

"As cycling advocates and campaigners, one of the things we hear most often from people who don't cycle is their fear of traffic. We've built CycleStreets to help them discover cycle-friendly routes and cut-throughs you never knew existed. CycleStreets aims to be like a knowledgeable cyclist, wherever you are in the UK."

CycleStreets will this week be launching a funding drive to raise funds for two full-time developers. With so many requests for new features and ways of using the system coming from user feedback, we want to move CycleStreets to the next level.

—

For more information contact:

Martin Lucas-Smith, Developer;
www.cyclestreets.net/contacts

Cambridge, 22nd September 2010

Future Friendly have informed us that the voting deadline has been extended by a week, to 26th September, so if you've not yet voted, please do!

This week is the last week to vote to get OpenStreetMap-based CycleStreets a bursary of £10,000 in the Future Friendly Awards! We're one 5 groups in the national finals. Such funding would make an enormous difference to the project.

To win, we need as many votes as possible, though you can of course only vote once, so please spread the word!

To vote, click on the logo near the top-right of their website:

Go to the voting site! »

Have a look at the great film they've made about our work, as well as the other films about other great projects around the UK.

We're pleased to announce that we're one of the five national environmental projects nominated for the Future Friendly Awards!

To win, we need as many votes as possible, though you can of course only vote once, so please spread the word!

To vote, click on the logo near the top-right of their website:

Vote now! »

Have a look at the great film they've made about our work, as well as the other films about other great projects around the UK.

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

CamTechNet have kindly featured us this week in their 'Voices in the crowd' series.

We discuss who we are, the history of CycleStreets, involvement of other people in our enterprise, the Startup community in Cambridge, and our hopes for the future.

Read their interview with us!

CamTechNet as an organisation aims to:

• Provide a single platform to publicise all sources of information relating to the high-tech community in the Cambridge area.
• Provide a forum where the experience and knowledge gained is shared, for others to learn from.
• Link like minded people across many technology sectors, and allow them to post and comment on news and events.
• Provide a single platform for presenting high-tech jobs in the Cambridge area, as advertised directly by employers.

Do have a look round the CamTechNet website!

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!

When launching our site as a beta a year ago, we adapted an off-the-shelf design for the design of the site. This has stayed in place ever since.

However, based on feedback over the last year, and our own experiences as both users of the site and as user interface designers, we know that it is not perfect.

As we move the site towards a full release, we are keen to have some redesign work done.

However, we only have a small grant of £600 (tiny, we know!) available for this, so if you are a designer who is keen to support what is a not-for-profit project by helping us out at this very low rate, please do get in touch.

Areas which we particularly want to address are:

• Making the map panel [e.g. see front page] bigger (possibly considerably so) – we have had a lot of feedback and it’s an increasing expectation.
• De-cluttering the Photomap screens [example], which have never had much design attention on them, and making the workflow here much more intuitive.
• Working out what to do about the itinerary page [example] which needs to be bigger and have less detail.
• Dealing better with the issue of how to represent three journey choices on the itinerary page.
• Potentially moving to a fluid width so that people who have a larger screen can use the space better.
• Reducing the boxyness of the design generally.
• Dealing with the question of whether it’s best to have a single big map and dispense with maplets altogether, or whether the maplets actually are useful to people [example - scroll down].
• Having things like nicely shaded buttons and UI widgets rather than the flat stuff we have everywhere.

Over the last month we’ve done a lot of work to reorganise the code to enable design improvements to be implemented more easily (particularly with the Photomap pages), so that page elements can be moved around more easily.

If you can help, please do let us know, including some links to your previous work – we’d love to hear from you.

Today (20th March 2010) is our first anniversary – we launched a year ago today, 20th March 2009.

We’d like to thank everyone that has been involved in any way in CycleStreets, and we look forward to a real take-off of the project as it matures in coming months and years.

We’re pleased to announce that the CycleStreets Cycle Journey Planner today reached a milestone of 100,000 journeys planned.

(Well, actually it was 99,999 – we added the next one to reserve the number!)

How long till 1 million? … :)