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. […]

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Ramping up planning speed

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 […]

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Award of grant from the Co-op Community Fund

We’re pleased to announce that CycleStreets has just been awarded a grant of £1,000 from the Co-operative Community Fund, towards boosting our server capacity, which is great news. We’d like to the thank the Co-op for their support. This is a significant boost in our forthcoming efforts to scale up the system towards a full […]

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Designer needed!

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 […]

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Happy 1st birthday to us!

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.

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Ordnance Survey data consultation – our response

The government has been running a consultation on proposals to open up Ordnance Survey’s data relating to electoral and local authority boundaries, postcode areas and mid scale mapping information. We have responded: Our response to the Ordnance Survey data consultation The key points we make are that: Without change, Ordnance Survey is at considerable risk of […]

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Finding streets and places now quicker

As well as adding postcode search support recently, we’ve this week we’ve upgraded the general street/place finding system (called a ‘geocoder’). We’ve moved to using the new Nominatim system (technical details for those interested) by Brian Quinion – thanks to him and anyone else involved in that project. Some tips for quicker searches are: If […]

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Postcode searching added

Thanks to a grant (see our earlier blog posting) from Cambridge Sustainable City (part of Cambridge City Council), we have now added full postcode searching. Postcode searching is clearly an expectation of users, and our data suggests some users have given up doing journey plans at all – on the assumption that the lack of […]

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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 […]

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