Quietly working away…

This blog has been a bit quiet recently, as we’ve been quietly working away very hard on a range of projects which are now being launched. We’ll have blog posts on each of these in the coming weeks:

• The new Halfords cycle journey planner is live on their website, complementing their wide range of bikes and advice to help people get cycling. It includes map markers for easy directions to their stores.
• We’ve created the Cycle Hackney app (iPhone and Android) for Hackney Council, which aims to provide information to the Council on where people cycle for their daily journeys, and where improvements to the street and path network are most needed. This combines crowsourced GPS traces to help create a heatmap of utility cycle journeys. The app was launched at the Hackney Cycling Conference 2014.
• We created the Urban Cycle Parking website for London Cycling Campaign, which enables cyclists in London to pinpoint where cycle parking is needed and where it already exists, with all data being fed to Transport for London (plus existing parking data to OpenStreetMap)
• We’ve created a batch routing system (with a job control web interface) for one of our app routing data users, which creates a matrix of all possible routes between cycle hire stations (e.g. the London Cycle Hire scheme) or within a grid of squares within a city.
• We’ve supported the CTC’s Space for Cycling portal, whose photos also go into our Photomap, helping build on the fantastic library of over 50,000 locations (all fully-categorised) already present.
• We’re finalising the launch of our API (data interface) Version 2 – this is a modern JSON-only API interface to the many parts of our system, and corrects many of the frustrations of our current API. As well as making things much easier for mobile and other websites to obtain routes and integrate with other facilities we offer, it adds new API calls, GeoJSON output for all geographical features by default, new  features, standardised error handling, and a fresh set of documentation complete with clear examples.
• We’ve almost completed replacing all the code that powers our slippy maps from OpenLayers-based to Leaflet. Changes like that happen ‘inside the crankcase’ and give us more power and flexibility to develop the system while users are often unaware that there have been changes – which is generally a good thing. This will enable us finally to add long-demanded features such as multiple waypoints, draggable routing and leisure routing options, which our underlying data interface (API) has supported now for quite some time. This has been a large task, with much knock-on internal reworking, including the need to have GeoJSON output in the API while not disrupting other users of our API. This work is part of a project to overhaul and modernise our web interface, which has been partly funded thanks to a Cambridge Cycling & Walking Promotion grant. We’d like to thank Cambridge City Council for enabling this long-awaited project to move forward. We’ll shortly be seeking out a designer and blogging more about our aims with this large project.
• We’ve added a user profile available to each user on the site, so all photos by a user are grouped together. This facility will continue to evolve.
• Cyclescape, our toolkit for cycle campaigners [read more], has seen a range of improvements and fixes.
• For Cambridge Cyclescape, we’re pleased to announce a grant from Cambridge Sustainable City who have kindly given a grant to fund some changes specifically requested by the Cambridge group – we’ll report on the Cyclescape blog soon about these developments.

Stay tuned to the blog for articles on each of these.

PS One of our lead developers, Martin, has co-written ‘Making Space for Cycling‘, a new publication endorsed by the whole spectrum of UK cycling advocacy groups. It explains to UK decision-makers how best to provide cycle infrastructure that will get more people cycling. Paper copies can be obtained from Cyclenation and Cambridge Cycling Campaign.