The main focus of our development work over the last few months has been to improve the performance of our routing engine. This has become a priority with the need to serve routes on new mobile platforms, where the expectation that a route should appear quickly is even higher than those interacting with CycleStreets via […]
On Saturday we held an intensive but successful event that focussed on the development challenges for CycleStreets. It was attended by computer scientists, software engineering professionals and webmasters who have experience in managing online services. This summarises some of the stuff we talked about. Processing OpenStreetMap (OSM) data to build a Graph for Cycle Routing We […]
Short video clips can now be added to the photomap. Here’s an example of Simon getting his feet wet on the flooded section of the public bridleway next to the Cambridgeshire busway. Videos can be up to 50 MB in size, and may include sound. Formats currently supported are MOV, AVI, WMV and FLV. They […]
For a bit of fun I realised I could plot the start points of planned journeys on the photomap. I’ve done this for the last 2009:
In its desire to avoid busy roads, the Journey Planner sometimes finds complicated cycling routes that have many turns. We have come to talk of this problem as wiggliness. We’ve started work on changing the journey planner so that it finds a better balance between the quietness of a route and the number of turns. […]
Over the past month we’ve changed the algorithm that searches the map to find routes. It is now much more like the A*search algorithm. The results it produces are identical to those produced previously, but it happens faster. A* is fast because it uses a clever way of minimizing the amount of map it needs […]
Thank you very much to the very many of you who told us that you recently voted for our project. We were beaten in our region by a group who enable disadvantaged people to gain access to the internet – an equally worthwhile cause – and we wish them great success with their project. During […]
Until now the ‘quietness’ of the suggested routes has been a fairly discrete percentage score. We’ve add a graphic and some descriptive text that gives a quick overview of how busy a route might be: The overall quietness of a route depends on how much of the journey is spent on the different types of […]
After about a month in testing we’re today making available a new kind of routing on CycleStreets – namely ‘Balanced routes’. Regular users of CycleStreets will be familiar with the Fastest and Quietest routes. They represent two extremes of cycle route – one where time is of the essence, and the other which tries to […]
We’ve added elevation profiles to the route listings. They show how hilly or gentle the suggested routes are likely to be: The vertical scale shows the height in feet, and the horizontal scale the distance along the route, in miles. The vertical scale is usually 300 feet, unless you’ve found a very hilly route, (in […]