Talk given to State Of The Map Scotland 2013.

1. CycleStreets:
past, present, future
Cycle journey planning, for cyclists, by cyclists

2. What does CycleStreets do?

3. What does CycleStreets do?
Photomap / Cyclescape
Campaigning tool

4. CycleStreets: who?
Simon Nuttall
Martin Lucas-Smith
Routemaster
Webmaster
… and various people helping out in various ways!

5. Journey planner: features







Route choices: fastest/quietest/balanced
UK, and…
Takes accounts of hills
Turn-by-turn
Photos-en-route
CO2 saved, Calories
Waypoints…

6. “why?”

simon, http://cycle.st/p3481

7. Why?
 “More people cycling, more safely, more
often”
 Challenges to getting more people cycling
 Traffic, confidence, cultural issues
 Routes – different to car routes!
 Poor infrastructure

8. Why we do it…
 “It helped me find a quick route from
my house to my new job. Very much
appreciated, well done.”
 “Needed route planning with very
current Cambridge maps and just
used the excellent
http://cyclestreets.net for the first
time (non-cyclist).”

9. history

martin, http://cycle.st/p33221

10. CycleStreets: history
 Cambridge Cycling Campaign journey planner
 June 2006
 5,000 lines drawn over Gmap sat
 47,000 journeys planned
 15,000 photos

11. CycleStreets: history
 Edinburgh CycleStreets
 Scottish Government’s Sustainable Transport
section grant via Chris Hill, Changing Pace

12. CycleStreets: history
 Lots of requests for same thing around the UK
 OpenStreetMap: free, no barriers
 UK-wide: March 2009
 Busy since then

13. Struggling to keep up!
 Millions of cycle journeys
 Tens of millions multimodal journey API calls

14. “standing on our own two feet”

kbrumann, http://cycle.st/p10560

15. Social enterprise
 Not a business for sake of being a business
 Ltd company, not-for-profit
 Charity not appropriate structure

Picture: umi3.co.uk

16. Funding
 Generally low-cost operation
 Big projects and embedded journey planners
 Turnover: 8k, 37k, 121k, 21k
 1.5 years worth of salary (over 4 years)

Picture: utilityweek.co.uk

17. “going mobile”

bblake, http://cycle.st/p16715

18. iPhone
app

19. Android
app

20. BB10
app

21. HTML5
app

22. Windows
Phone 8
app

23. Third-party
 Third-party API
 Barclays Bikes
 Bike Hub industry
satnav
 Citymapper
London/NY
 ViewRanger
 etc.

24. Bike Hub

25. Citymapper
(bike routes)

26. Barclays
Bikes

27. Local Authorities

timbo, http://cycle.st/p37664

28. White-label sites – Local Authorities
 cyclestreets.net/services

29. Cycling Scotland
 Website journey planner
http://cyclejourneyplanner.cyclingscotland.org/

30. Community
mapping
guide
 www.cyclestreets.net/getmapping/guide/

31. PleaseCycle

32. West Sussex cycle planner

34. Various others









CTC
Bike Week
LCC
Somerset County Council
Bike Hub
Cambridge Cycling Campaign
Beactive (Royal Mail)
Spogo
… more

35. Back in January 2011...
Transport Direct CJP
CycleStreets
www.transportdirect.info/Web2/JourneyPlanning/FindCycleInput.aspx
www.cyclestreets.net
£2.4 million (from tax)
£28k
92,000 journeys planned
458,000 journeys planned
£26.09 per journey
6p per journey
£1m – budget for 2011
£130k needed
32 areas (professionally surveyed)
UK-wide
(dated Jan 2011, total now = ??)
(dated Jan 2011, reached 3.4m as of now)
(but depends on OSM completeness)

36. Was main feature on data.gov.uk for months!

37. UKGov
Now much more positive relationship
Realise value through open data
Their data going into OSM
Want to make CycleStreets
the solution of choice
for Local Authorities

38. England Cycling Data project

39. Transport
consultancies
- SDG

40. Transport information providers
- Traveline Cymru

41. Bike Hub leisure routing

42. Prahou na kole
(Prague by bike)

43. Photomap-based sites

44. Photomap-based sites

45. POI-based stuff

46. Flexible platform
 Work done for ‘skinnable’ interfaces
 Re-use of components for other systems

47. “putting it together”

simon, http://cycle.st/p1221

48. How a routing engine works
• Find route with lowest score, i.e. least ‘friction’
• ‘Shortest path algorithm’ - Standard problem in
computer science, we use A* method

49. How it works (briefly)

50. How it works
 Adjust for hills
 Surface quality
 Cycle lane widths
 Barriers, obstructions (even dropped kerbs)
 Lighting
 Turn delays now in engine

51. How it works (briefly)
 So each path/street now has a score
User comes to the site
 System finds lowest total score from A to B
 Repeat for quietest/fastest/balanced (different
scores for each)

52. Network compression
 Cell optimisation ( ‘Cello’)
Makes routing faster
A
9
8
4
10
C
A
D
6
3
AC = 9
B
9
Park: 4 nodes & 7 edges
C
AD,BD = 7
BC = 6
B
After: 3 nodes & 3 edges

53. OpenStreetMap
CycleStreets data interrogation

54. Getting involved: open sourcing
 Greater involvement
 Really, really are almost there now!
 Keeping it running priority
 Code from 2006-2013
 Mobile apps, scripts,
Cyclescape done
 github.com/cyclestreets

55. “challenges”

Warrington’s “Cycle Facility of the Month”, http://cycle.st/p11500

56. Competition
 Google
 OpenStreetMap-based
 UKGov

57. Uniqueness
 More than just a routing engine
 Needs a product / identity / ecosystem
 Detailed knowledge of how cyclists behave
 Cycling community embeddedness
 Flexible platform

58. Challenges






Modernising the interface
Funding
Codebase is large and ageing
Moving from closed to open project
Competition: cycle planning less niche
Going global!

59. Cyclescape: campaigner
toolkit

kbrumann, http://cycle.st/p14131

60. Helping campaigners get more people cycling, more often

61.  Cycling offers many solutions to
transport problems – efficient, cheap,
healthy, no CO2.
 UK (2% rate)
vs Netherlands (30%)

62. CycleStreets Photomap

63. Fixing cycle-unfriendly streets
Needs local pressure through campaigning
Voluntary groups – lack of time, knowledge, etc.

64. Typical problems of campaigning
Lots of issues, hard to keep track of
E-mail lists broken technology: all/nothing, off-topic
No usable archive of discussions
Hard to match people with locations
Hard to prioritise when lots of issues
Poor categorisation

65. Typical problems of campaigning
Miss planning applications
Hard to get new people involved
Guidance and official rules hard to find
Data like collisions needed
Easy to miss deadlines
HIGH BARRIER
TO INVOLVEMENT

66. Cyclescape aims to tackle these
Members watch areas
Subscribed when issues added
Discuss, in geographical context
Propose solutions

67. Cyclescape aims to tackle these
Members watch areas
Subscribed when issues added
Discuss, in geographical context
Propose solutions

69. www.cyclescape.org

70. Features designed for groups

71. Collision data
 www.cyclestreets.net/collisions

72. Planning applications

73. Planning applications

75. Where are we now?
Site live, feature in place
Usability work and finishing-off
Anyone know where we
can get £15k ?
blog.cyclescape.org

76. David Earl
Martin Lucas-Smith,
www.CycleStreets.net
Twitter: @cyclestreets
info@cyclestreets.net