Guernsey CycleStreets

Cycling on the national stage

May 14th, 2012

The last few months have seen a big resurgent movement of people wanting to see better cycling conditions around the UK. We couldn’t let this pass without some brief comment!

Cities Fit for Cycling – Times CycleSafe

The Times newspaper has been running a fantastic campaign, Cities Fit for Cycling, which has massively raised the profile cycle safety issues, with its 8-point manifesto that echoes many of the key issues often raised by cycle campaigners.

As a search for #CycleSafe on Twitter will show, Cities Fit for Cycling has really captured the imagination and interest of cycle campaigners – and increasingly the general public – around the UK, and especially in London.

A series of articles has really upped the pressure on decision-makers, leading to parliamentary debates, and London Cycling Campaign have helped pile on the pressure by organising The Big Ride.

Through our own project Cyclescape we are hoping to enable the enthusiasm of campaigners to be facilitated more at a local level.

Summer of Cycling

This summer sees the Summer of Cycling. It’s a great opportunity to encourage someone you know to get on their bike!

The Summer of Cycling is a national campaign running this summer which aims to encourage more people to cycle. The All-Party Parliamentary Cycling Group and The Bicycle Association, alongside the force of 23 cycling organisations are aiming to double cycling this summer.

It’s about encouraging everyone with an interest in cycling to share the fun and introduce just one friend, neighbour, colleague or family member to cycling.

Who’s your +1 ?

Go Dutch! says London Cycling Campaign

London is seeing a resurgence of interest in the idea of Going Dutch, thanks to cyclists led by London Cycling Campaign, of which we are proud to be members, and others.

LCC have done a brilliant job over the last year in challenging decision-makers to do better in places like Blackfriar’s Bridge and Parliament Square, and to do what virtually no other group has done, and actually showcase actual alternative designs, putting forward a wonderfully positive agenda. From our own experience in cycling around the Netherlands, we know how much this would benefit every Londoner, and so we fully support LCC’s efforts.

Have a look at more Photos from the Netherlands in our Photomap, some of which were from our own trip with Cambridge Cycling Campaign.

We hope some of the above will inspire you to get more involved, wherever you are!

— Martin and Simon

Posted in Elsewhere | No Comments »

CycleStreets Mobile web site judged “Best Application Design” by usability expert

May 11th, 2012

We’re delighted that the CycleStreets Mobile web site has been judged one of the “Best Application Designs”, by renowned web usability guru, Jakob Nielsen!

The mobile site was one of the winners in the Lightweight Applications category. You can read the report announcing the winners on his site, and a fuller downloadable report is available (for a fee).

The site is a small-screen version of our main site, and is intended to work on a range of mobile devices, such as iPhone, Android, modern Blackberry devices and more. (We haven’t quite got full compatibility for Windows Phone 7.5 Mango yet, but if you can help, do contribute to the codebase.)

As the report outlines, our aim with producing a mobile web browser app was to enable quick and simple planning of journeys on a small screen, offering the key functionality of CycleStreets with a minimum of fuss, a quick download time, and providing clear large buttons. We were able to include much of the usability learning from the main site and the iPhone and Android apps in creating the site, and as such it includes many of the best elements of each of them. For instance, there is a quick way to switch routes directly and to see the details of the route without going to a different screen. Also, the crosshairs concept enables quick and accurate planning and avoids problems with large fingers obscuring the start/finish points.

The site was created by Anna Powell-Smith, who we’d like to congratulate! We’d also like to thank Tom Steinberg of MySociety whose insight into one key aspect of the app really helped improve it.

Posted in Features, Mobile | No Comments »

Cyclescape: More features in place

May 10th, 2012

Cyclescape is the toolkit for cycle campaign groups that we’re developing. Here’s the latest update, cross-posted from the Cyclescape blog:

Work is continuing apace with Cyclescape, with more features now in place as we work up to a wider release to Campaign groups around the country.

There are still quite a number of unfinished areas, but we’re getting there. Andrew and (most recently) Andy have been busy adding more in place for us.

Deadline setting
Collision data
Per-thread attachments
Committee-only privacy setting
Popular issues

Read about these below:

Deadline setting:

Deadlines (or other dates) can now be set.

Our experience of cycle campaigning is that it’s often easy to miss a consultation deadline or some other date, if there’s a lot going on. By then, it’s too late, and the opportunity to see improvements to cycling are missed.

The set dates are now listed in ‘My Cyclescape’, the user’s main summary area. We’ll be developing this interface further.

Collision data:

Collision data is now integrated, using a new data feed from CycleStreets, and linking through to their collision reports.

This feature has been developed for the Cambridge group, pushed forward because of the large number of planning applications in that area, for which collision data can often provide a useful context.

Development of this feature, and various underlying code pre-requisites, has been possible thanks to a grant from Cambridge Sustainable City, whose support has been invaluable.

This screenshot, for instance, shows the site of collisions in Mill Road, an area subject to continuing pressures on cyclists from lorries. Several planning applications in recent years would have benefitted from this data being available.

The finalised interface for collisions isn’t quite in place yet – buttons for this will be added to finish it off.

Per-thread attachments:

Attachments can now be added to individual discussion threads. Previously the only way to add an attachment was to add it to the Library, which is always public.

Currently there is a slight limitation that, if e-mailing to the discussion thread (since you can reply to things via e-mail, not just via the website), attachments do not get through. We’re working on this!

Committee-only privacy setting:

There are now three privacy options for each discussion thread:

Public (publicly visible)
Group (i.e. available to all members of the group)
Committee (available only to current Committee members)

The latter option means that groups can discuss sensitive matters in privacy if required, e.g. pre-consultation plans from a developer.

There is a setting in the group’s area which sets the default (public/group) when their members start a discussion thread.

Popular issues:

Cyclescape has a voting system, which now results in a list of popular items, ensuring that key strategic issues can stay floated to the top.

More will be done to expose this feature in due course, as the rest of the interface is improved, but the underlying functionality is now in place.

The What’s New? link at the end of each page on the site has a log of individual features and bugfixes as they are put in.

Bit by bit, the site’s functionality and interface is falling into place!

In our next Cyclescape blog post we’ll talk about what we’re currently working on, i.e. what’s missing and what’s not yet finished.

Posted in Cyclescape (campaigner toolkit) | No Comments »

Talk in Cambridge: “Using Open Data and Crowdsourcing to develop CycleStreets”

April 25th, 2012

If you’re in Cambridge on Thursday, come and hear about CycleStreets behind the scenes, organised by BCS East Anglia!

Location: Red Gate Software, 12 Cambridge Business Park, CB4 0WZ [Cycle there - directions]

Date and time: 6:30pm – 8pm, Thursday, 26th April, 2012

The event is free, and there will an opportunity for networking before the talk, from 6.15pm.

Full details and signup at http://bcscyclestreets.eventbrite.com/ (but feel free just to turn up).

About the talk:

The arrival of web-based mapping from Google and others has revolutionised, in the space of only five years, the way many people interact with maps and map data. And the success of projects such as Wikipedia highlight how collation of small amounts of information from large numbers of people – an approach called ‘crowdsourcing’ – can challenge traditional models of data collection and ownership.

Bringing these concepts together is OpenStreetMap, a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world. Well-established enterprises such as the Ordnance Survey are coming under increased pressure from this new model, and large companies such as MapQuest and Microsoft are starting to use and invest in it.

Martin Lucas-Smith, one of two main developers of the leading UK-wide cycle journey planner website,CycleStreets, will discuss OpenStreetMap, its use within a range of systems (from cartography, routing, and even its central role helping deal with the Haiti disaster), the challenges it poses to traditional forms of data collection.

He will talk about how CycleStreets works, as well the design and innovation challenges that CycleStreets as a social enterprise has faced.

Slides from the talk

Slides from the talk are now available:

Posted in Open data, Promotion | No Comments »

UK Collision Map – a new resource for the cycle campaigning community

March 30th, 2012

We’re pleased to launch today a new resource for the cycling community: a browsable, searchable collision map with complete details of every reported road collision involving cyclists in the UK since 2005. This will also be integrated into our new campaigning toolkit being finalised, Cyclescape.

www.cyclestreets.net/collisions

Not only can you browse around the map, but you can also:

Select areas to get all the details of each collision in that area (see screenshot below)
View full details of each collision and its associated vehicles and people involved
Export the data to a spreadsheet
Drill down through the data (which will soon be linked with the geographical view)
Search the data

At present the map view is limited to cycle collisions (but the search interface can retrieve others).

This new facility has been possible thanks to power of Open Data – in the form of the recent release by the government of STATS19 data. STATS19 is the system used by the Police to record details of each collision and, as part of that, each vehicle and person involved. The dataset is incredibly detailed, and so we want to help campaigners make sense of it.

In our work to compile the data, we’ve gone a step further and added the drawing, export and search tools (as we had existing code to make that fairly easy to add).

You can click on any point to see a summary of key details, and then click to view the full report, each of which has a stable URL for future linking:

The main driver for this work has been to create a data interface (API) for Cyclescape, our campaigning toolkit, which will shortly have the ability to press a button to view collision data around the area of an issue (e.g. a poor junction) being discussed by campaigners. For the Cambridge area, this work to integrate it into Cyclescape is being funded by Cambridge Sustainable City, as part of a set of improvements that are desperately needed by Cambridge Cycling Campaign for a range of campaigns on longer lorries, huge planning applications and junction problems.

We’ve therefore created and documented an API that exposes the data. (We cannot guarantee the API will be stable until a few weeks’ time.)

Lastly – partly to help with testing – there is also a detailed search, which will shortly be integrated more fully with the geographical drawing facility.

Do let us have your feedback and let us know what you’d like to prioritise next. Stabilisation of the API will be our foremost priority in the short term.

We’ll be considering whether to take into account this data into the journey planner engine. As cycle campaigners ourselves, we know that collision data is subject to considerable under-reporting, and thus we would need a high statistical significance to use it for that purpose.

Posted in API, Cyclescape (campaigner toolkit), Open data | 2 Comments »

Guest post: ViewRanger – Building a worldwide community of outdoor enthusiasts

March 12th, 2012

This is a guest post from ViewRanger, who have just added our routing system to their products. They write about ViewRanger and their use of our routing API.

ViewRanger is the mobile app that will turn your smartphone into a complete Outdoors GPS.

It’s become the choice of walkers, cyclists, mountain bikers, and for many other activities, because of its comprehensive range of features including waypoint navigation, friend tracking, sports GPS, its web based route planning, and extensive choice of maps (including Ordnance Survey) and downloadable route guides (such as from Nick Cotton Rides, Cycle NI, and Cumbria Tourism). ViewRanger is also used and trusted by more than half of the mountain rescue teams in England, Wales, and Ireland.

ViewRanger has always been passionate about outdoors recreation, it’s what gets us up in the morning and it was the catalyst to start our business – when we delivered our first app back in the summer of 2006 running on early Nokia Symbian smartphones.

Today our ViewRanger Outdoors GPS app can be downloaded on Apple iPhone & iPad, on Android smartphones and tablets, on Symbian smartphones, and on the BlackBerry Playbook; and we have built a community of outdoor enthusiasts in around 150 countries around the world. Alongside our mobile app is a social network website, My.ViewRanger.com, where users can discover, create, and share their outdoor experiences – all synced with the app on their smartphone and tablet.

The My.ViewRanger site is also a trail publishing platform that makes it easy for organizations and individuals to freely create and publish leisure route guides. All trail guides are branded, and can include rich information including photos, web links, even location-triggered audio or video clips. Free to use “widgets” make it quick and easy to embed interactive route maps websites, blog posts, and Facebook sites. (Any publishers or local tourism organizations wishing to publish route guides, with navigable route, text and photos, through the ViewRanger platform should contact craig@viewranger.com)

Key to the My.ViewRanger website is the ability to plot routes from scratch, dropping key waypoints along a path. Our users are often using a mix of on-road and off-road trails – so we needed to go further than a basic “snap to road” capability.

Our approach has been to build a hybrid framework that allows the My.ViewRanger site to select the best-of-breed journey planner for that particular planning action, based on information about the user. So, for cyclists in the UK we can leverage the excellent work done by the CycleStreets team, whilst for backpackers in the US we leverage a planner that uses intelligence about the terrain to deliver off-road route calculation in the mountains. Available right now within the free route planner on the My.ViewRanger website, we will be adding the Route Generation tool into our apps too.

CycleStreets is the best cycling trip planner in the UK – so it was natural that we should choose to integrate this into our platform. Doing so was very straightforward. The CycleStreets API is very developer friendly and is well documented. At this stage, we have deliberately kept the options constrained for the user – our aim is that the ViewRanger Route Generation tool should be intelligent about what parameters to pass to the CycleStreets journey planner, personalizing these for each user.

We were up and running with the CycleStreets API quickly, and the routing results are impressive and, of course, show a real knowledge of the issues that concern a cyclist when planning a trip. Feedback from our UK users has been very positive – with some commenting that we have “built magic” into the My.ViewRanger site.

The CycleStreets API lets us interactively generate and regenerate the route each time that a user plots, or moves, a waypoint. This allows a user to manipulate the route to meet their needs, which is important as our users are typically planning leisure trails rather than wanting to find the most efficient route to commute by bicycle to their workplace.

Once a route has been planned, then it can be synced wirelessly to the user’s ViewRanger mobile app, or text and photos can be added and the guided route can be published and shared with the whole ViewRanger community.

ViewRanger has been a #1 ranked app on iTunes and other appstores in many countries around the world. Partnering with talented organizations such as CycleStreets helps us to keep delivering the best outdoors gps experience available and helping outdoor enthusiasts discover, plan, navigate and share their trips.

The ViewRanger GPS app is available to download for free on Android, Symbian, and BlackBerry Playbook, and is available to download for £1.99 on Apple. Access to the My.ViewRanger website is free.