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 […]
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 […]
The main focus of our development work over the last few months has been to improve the performance of our routing engine. This has become a priority with the need to serve routes on new mobile platforms, where the expectation that a route should appear quickly is even higher than those interacting with CycleStreets via […]
Here's a screen snapshot of work in progress on CycleStreets. It shows the shortest route from Dover to Cape Wrath – i.e. the entire length of the country! Basically it uses the A1 – so the Romans were about right then! We've been working on a much faster routing engine that will, as a side-effect, […]
At present, we've a couple of areas of work that we've been prioritising, to address known weaknesses with the system. Firstly, we've been working to reduce the 'wigglyness' of some routes. The problem is that the journey planner engine does not yet take account of turn delays. Once this is finally rolled out, routes will […]
We’ve rolled out an improvement to the journey planning engine which should mean it returns the route solutions about a third more quickly than before. It’s still not as fast as we would like, but we have plans to make a major change this coming month or so which we believe will make a much […]
On Saturday we held an intensive but successful event that focussed on the development challenges for CycleStreets. It was attended by computer scientists, software engineering professionals and webmasters who have experience in managing online services. This summarises some of the stuff we talked about. Processing OpenStreetMap (OSM) data to build a Graph for Cycle Routing We […]
We’ve created some long-needed documentation: Overview of CycleStreets: your questions answered, covering a number of areas: Features: Cycle journey planner Features: Photomap Many more features Homepages for 1,500+ towns/cities/districts around the UK Branded versions for Local Authorities and others Community-based, not-for-profit The map data: where it comes from and how you can contribute How we use […]
For a bit of fun I realised I could plot the start points of planned journeys on the photomap. I’ve done this for the last 2009:
In its desire to avoid busy roads, the Journey Planner sometimes finds complicated cycling routes that have many turns. We have come to talk of this problem as wiggliness. We’ve started work on changing the journey planner so that it finds a better balance between the quietness of a route and the number of turns. […]