The announcement today that Google are to include Sustrans cycle routes alongside other transport modes is welcome confirmation that cycling is becoming more mainstream. Pitching the various transport options side-by-side will allow people to discover that, for instance, a 3-mile journey across a city can be much quicker to cycle than to drive. Making cycling […]
Cycling on the national stage
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 […]
CycleStreets – review of the year
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. […]
CycleStreets discussed in Parliament
Friday 21st January 2011 saw a short Adjournment Debate in the House of Commons on the subject of "Cycling in England". A question was raised as to the government's support for use of tax money (£2.4 million) on the TransportDirect cycle journey planner when CycleStreets (£28.1k spent) already exists. This debate on cycling was secured by […]
Save Bikeability and Cycling England
As we recently wrote, rumours are circulating that the government’s cycling body, Cycling England and its excellent initiatives such as Bikeability, may be axed due to government cuts. These rumours are getting stronger by the day. We think shutting down Bikeability and Cycling England would be disastrous for the future of cycling in the UK. Cambridge […]
Support Cycling England
We are alarmed at the news that Cycling England may be facing the axe, and that the future of the excellent Bikeability cycle training scheme and other important initiatives is therefore uncertain. Cycling England is the arms-length agency of the Department for Transport which deals with cycling. Its remit is to get "more people cycling, […]
Guest post: Introducing Cycle Hire App
This is a guest post from Alex, creator of Cycle Hire App – for the London cycle hire scheme, who is using our routing interface in his app. We asked him to tell our readers about his app, as it's one of our favourite apps of the seven(!) that have been released, and that's not […]
An interesting Freedom of Information request
Cambridge resident and democracy activist, Richard Taylor has written today about a Freedom of Information request he made recently on the subject of the government’s efforts to create a Cycle Journey Planner, available through the Transport Direct portal. For the avoidance of doubt, Richard is not involved with CycleStreets, though our database shows he has […]
Ordnance Survey data freed (partially)
Easter came early this year! In the last few days there has been a blaze of activity around the long-awaited changes by the Government to the way the Ordnance Survey’s data is controlled. A significant number of its excellent datasets have been freed up, which we think is excellent news for the UK geographical community. […]
Google bike there
Google have just launched bike routing in various cities around the United States, after involving the cycling community there. A few people have asked us (and our US-based equivalent, Ride The City) what we think. The simple answer is that more availability of bike routing is a good thing. There is undoubtedly space for CycleStreets, Google and […]