CycleStreets is a not-for-profit

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

organisation that provides a free-to-use national cycle

journey planner A journey planner, trip planner, or route planner is a specialized search engine used to find an optimal means of travelling between two or more given locations, sometimes using more than one transport mode. Searches may be optimized on differen ...

for the

. The planner uses

OpenStreetMap OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free, open geographic database updated and maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveys, trace from aerial imagery and also import from other freely licensed g ...

data for routing,

Shuttle Radar Topography Mission The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) is an international research effort that obtained digital elevation models on a near-global scale from 56°S to 60°N, to generate the most complete high-resolution digital topographic database of Ea ...

for height data and official

postcode A postal code (also known locally in various English-speaking countries throughout the world as a postcode, post code, PIN or ZIP Code) is a series of letters or digits or both, sometimes including spaces or punctuation, included in a postal a ...

data. It was launched in March 2009 and by January 2010 had planned 100,000 journeys. As of August 2015, the site has planned over 45 million itineraries. It was 'Highly Commended' at the 2009 ACT Travelwise awards. It provides worldwide routing using OpenStreetMap data.

History

CycleStreets is a development of the Cambridge Cycle Campaign Journey Planner, which was launched in 2006. CycleStreets itself was launched on 20 March 2009; which was by co-incidence the same day that it was announced that the Transport Direct Portal was about to introduce cycle routing for a small number of trial locations including

Manchester Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...

. In June 2009, a feature to plan circular routes was added and the project was featured in ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'' newspaper. In August 2009 functionality was added to export routes for use in

GPS The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally Navstar GPS, is a Radionavigation-satellite service, satellite-based radionavigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Space Force. It is one of t ...

device and the ability to route via ferry services and then in October 2009 the project released elevation profiles and 'Balanced routes'. In December 2009, CycleStreets was 'Highly Commended' in the ACT Travelwise annual awards. In February 2010, the ability to share short video clips was added and then in March 2010 CycleStreets added

Google Streetview Google Street View is a technology featured in Google Maps and Google Earth that provides interactive panoramas from positions along many streets in the world. It was launched in 2007 in several cities in the United States, and has since expan ...

images to the route description pages and a

post code A postal code (also known locally in various English-speaking countries throughout the world as a postcode, post code, PIN or ZIP Code) is a series of letters or digits or both, sometimes including spaces or punctuation, included in a postal a ...

look-up function. They reported their 100,000th journey plan itinerary the same month.

Development

In 2007, during the development of CycleStreets, Simon Nuttall and Martin Lucas-Smith advised Transport Direct on the CycleNetXChange data exchange standard for cycle route data which was later used in the Transport Direct Portal cycle journey planner. In July 2009, CycleStreets was presented at the OpenStreetMap annual 'State of the Map' Conference In September 2009, Martin Lucas Smith of CycleStreets presented the project at the School of Cartography Summer School. The project held its first 'Developer Day' in March 2010, where technical issues relating to the project were discussed and there was a session on cycle routing at WhereCampEU.

Funding

CycleStreets is a not-for-profit project and has been largely self-funded. It has received grants from the following organisations (in chronological order): *Cycling Scotland (£5,000): To develop a version of the site for Edinburgh, which Cycling Scotland are now promoting as a Scotland-wide system *

Cambridge City Council Cambridge City Council is a district council in the county of Cambridgeshire, which governs the City of Cambridge. History Cambridge was granted a Royal Charter by King John in 1207, which permitted the appointment of a mayor. The first recorde ...

— Cambridge Sustainable City project (£3,200) in February 2010. *Co-op Community Fund (£1,000) in March 2010. The project has also benefited from a number of donations in kind, including geographic information donated in

References

External links

CycleStreets website
*{{Google Play, net.cyclestreets Cycling in the United Kingdom Organizations established in 2009 Non-profit organisations based in the United Kingdom Route planning software OpenStreetMap Free and open-source Android software