CycleStreets homepages for your town/city/district … over 1,500 of them!

Over the last month we’ve been beavering away fixing bugs and working through the list of features that didn’t quite make it into our beta launch, as well as spending time improving the routing to deal with problems that have been pointed out to us.

Simon, our ‘routemaster’, has recently blogged about some of the improvements on the routing side of things, with many improvements ‘in the works’. We are striving to make the routing as close to what a human would choose as possible, and your feedback (via the feedback link on each route page) is a really helpful and important part of this.

One of the new interface improvements we’ve just rolled out is yourtown.cyclestreets.net.

We’ve added local homepages for over 1,500 towns, cities, metropolitan districts, and burghs all around the UK.

There are only three differences from the national www.cyclestreets.net :

• The map is focused by default in the area, saving you having to pan and zoom in
• Photos in the photomap are limited to that area.
• You get a nice URL like cambridge.cyclestreets.net

Other than that, the system works exactly like the UK-wide system.

Note that we can’t guarantee the routing quality in any area as we’re still making improvements, but hopefully this new feature will make testing/linking easier.

CycleStreets has been a national system since we went to public beta a few months ago. (As the creators of the original journey planner on the Cambridge Cycling Campaign website, we were contacted by many people wanting versions for their area, hence the rationale for CycleStreets UK.)

Here are some of the local homepages:

• cambridge.cyclestreets.net
• edinburgh.cyclestreets.net
• hinckley.cyclestreets.net
• oxford.cyclestreets.net
• kingston.cyclestreets.net
• london.cyclestreets.net

to name just six of the 1,657 areas we’ve pre-entered. 

If you find a town that isn’t covered (or spot an error in the map centring), do drop us a line! Likewise, if you are a cycle campaign group (or Local Authority) and wish to have information about cycling in the area on the ‘my area’ page, send us some info.

Another URL-related feature we’ll be adding shortly is the ability to specify a road/place in the URL as the starting/ending point for a journey, a bit like the excellent www.traintimes.org.uk website has, so that it is easy for organisations to provide a ‘how to get to us by bike’ link on their websites. I’ve long been a proponent of user-manipulable URLs, and these changes are obvious improvements that I’m sad we didn’t get have time to get into the beta launch.