Hi, I'm one of the two developers of CycleStreets. We're both local cycle campaigners based in Cambridge (it's definitely not a big business or government project!) and one of us is a professional cycle trainer.
By way of background, CycleStreets uses OpenStreetMap (OSM) data, which is not complete in all areas and does have some errors in it still. For those unfamiliar with OpenStreetMap, it's a bit like a geographical Wikipedia and intends to make a general-purpose, fully-featured map of the UK (and indeed the rest of the world!). Each stretch of road/path/pub/etc. comes from people uploading GPS tracks (many of which were from cyclists in fact).
We've been working on CycleStreets for a year, and it's basically a UK-wide version of the Cambridge-only version we wrote for Cambridge Cycling Campaign, a local voluntary group we've both been involved with for many years.
Origamist said:
According to the help section the labelling of such roads includes subjective appraisals of the quietness of the road
This isn't quite correct - I hope I can clarify.
Basically we only use purely *objective* data - i.e. what is actually on the ground - in fact that is a requirement of OpenStreetMap. Subjective data is useless for cycle routing because different cyclists have different levels of confidence and road preferences. For instance, I would happily cycle on major streets during rush-hour, whereas my parents wouldn't dream of it!
CycleStreets basically imports the OSM data every few days, and we apply a custom-written routing engine on top of that to dynamically compute routes. It in the engine that the subjective aspect gets added to take into account cyclist preferences.
The routing engine works in three modes, and all three choices are given when a user plans a route. These are: fastest, quietest, and a 'balance' between the two. The balanced mode tries to strike a balance to avoid the purity of the other two, though we are aiming to deal with some of the assumptions of those. For instance, the quietest routes sometimes end up favouring dismount sections too much, which of course we cyclists dislike!
'Fastest' (roughly meaning more hostile but fast and the kind of thing that confident cyclists are fine with, but probably not best for novice cyclists) and 'Quietest' (roughly pleasant and quiet) are done by applying a scoring on top of each type of road. E.g. 40mph roads are assumed to be fast but noisy, whereas local streets have a high quietness rating but are slower to traverse.
We know that the engine is not perfect yet, but we're working on it constantly. We've recently added taking account of hills, for instance. We're very aware of the problem of wiggly routes, and that's work in progress now.
Over time, we plan to take account of as many relevant data features as possible, for instance cobbled surface, path widths, traffic calming, etc. The challenges to these are (1) not making the engine too slow - after all, we don't have the server resources of someone like Google - in fact we've barely had any funding(!) and (2) that we're just two people so programming time is a limitation. There's also (3) that the OSM dataset doesn't always have these details in - though people can add them. (In some ways there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation in that there are few people using that data, so people don't collect it. CycleStreets we hope will act as a driver (excuse the pun) to get more of this data in so that the map becomes more useful.)
Feedback on routes, however small or critical, is *really* helpful to us. In some cases, a missing link, or a one-way street marked the wrong way means that a route. In other cases, the fault is more with the engine or the way we take in the data and translate it into road/path types. We analyse every piece of feedback and try to reply. So please do let us know if you get a dud route. Indeed, feedback of any kind - positive or negative - is really useful to us.
mattybain said:
BTW do you know what a yellow dot means? I can't see to get the map key up.
Yellow dots mean a crossing. (Incidentally, the engine currently takes account of traffic lights and will try to avoid these where sensible, because obviously they reduce momentum.)
There's a link in the bottom corner of the map to the key. (It's on our bug list to make this link clearer, as it's not really obvious enough yet.)
PS Please do vote to get us some funding - click on the red dot in the top-right corner of the front page. We're a tiny outfit trying to big things, and we are cycle campaigners at heart!
