[OSM-talk] Involving Cyclists in OSM

[Richard Fairhurst]

Clifford Snow wrote:
> I want to make sure I cover the salient points that would interest 
> cyclists. If you know of any websites that use bike routes or 
> otherwise make use of OSM data that would really be great.

Where do I start...? :)

Cycling and OSM have long been bedfellows. In Europe generally, and the UK
in particular, cyclists were the interest group that took to OSM first. Part
of the reason for this is economic (traditional geodata providers
concentrate on cars because there's more money there) but partly also
cultural, I think - cyclists have a culture of help-yourself and direct
action, and that chimes very well with OSM. Historically cycle maps have
been pretty poor, and OSM is the first chance to fix that, worldwide.



Cycle mapping in OSM really started in earnest in 2006, when we started
mapping the National Cycle Network in the UK:
  
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=WikiProject_United_Kingdom_National_Cycle_Network&oldid=3142

and in 2007 Andy Allan released the first version of what is now
OpenCycleMap to show this:
   https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2007-July/016012.html

(The National Cycle Network is run by Sustrans, a UK charity, and as it
happens a bunch of UK OSMers are or have been Sustrans volunteers.)



The other significant development at this time was mkgmap, which turns OSM
data into a map you can use on a handheld (or handlebar-mounted) Garmin GPS.
I put together perhaps the first OSM Garmin bike map in 2008:
  
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=OSM_Map_On_Garmin/Cycle_map&oldid=71511

and since then others have done amazing work building more and more complex
Garmin maps - Openfietsmap and Velomap are probably the two best known.



So, routing. Routing is particularly important to cyclists because road
systems and signage are generally designed for cars, funneling them onto
more and more major arteries - and that's the absolute opposite of what
cyclists want. If you're in London and simply follow the signs for Oxford it
will take you along motorways built for cars and closed to bikes. You know
all this.

OSM is the first worldwide routable dataset that offers the potential for
decent bike routing. Google has a go, and in many (mostly urban) areas
Google bike routing comes up with good results, but it can also take you
onto downright dangerous roads or impassable muddy tracks. If you ask Google
for a route from Land's End to John O'Groats, the iconic end-to-end
challenge in the UK (pretty much our equivalent of your Coast-to-Coast), it
suggests the infamously dangerous main highway through Cornwall:
   https://goo.gl/maps/nwrbcAxgFRm

and barely cyclable rural canal paths like this:
   http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/599319

OSM has richer data and can do better. And with the advances in routing
tools recently, particularly OSRM and Graphhopper, I think you could say
that OSM bike routing is now the best in the world.

There are lots of sites, but with no disrespect to the others who are doing
good stuff (MapMyRide, Komoot...) there are three I'd single out. Mikel has
already mentioned Strava, the favourite of road cyclists. Strava supplements
OSM mapping with their own massive tracklog database from their users'
rides, so it's not just sending you down roads that look good for cycling
algorithmically, but those where cyclists actually ride. The big proviso
with Strava is that it's a self-selecting userbase - they describe
themselves as "a global community of athletes", and if, like me, your
cycling isn't about being an "athlete" you'll find it takes you down the
routes favoured by speedsters rather than the quiet lanes you might prefer.
But it's the world's biggest bike routes site and they're doing a lot of
really interesting stuff with OSM.

CycleStreets (http://www.cyclestreets.net/), launched in 2009, was pretty
much the pioneer in OSM bike routing. It's essentially UK-only other than an
occasional outlier. It was the first site where you could ask for an A-B
route and pretty much guarantee you'd get something good back. It looks at
the full gamut of OSM tags to find a route, and is entirely custom-written
code. It was spun out of the Cambridge Cycling Campaign and really makes the
best of all their cycling knowledge.

And at the risk of blowing my own trumpet, there's cycle.travel
(http://cycle.travel/map), which I built. cycle.travel aims to give routes
as good as an OSM specialist like CycleStreets, but with the speed and
ease-of-use of Google's routeplanner - which means fully draggable routes, a
custom map showing relevant bike stuff, and ridiculous amounts of
preprocessing to get the OSM data just right.

It started UK-only, then Western Europe, and now does the US and Canada too.
The US routing is actually the most complex of the three, in its efforts to
keep you off busy roads but also to avoid the TIGER residential trap - the
last thing you want is to be routed along a "quiet rural residential road"
that actually turns out to be a drainage ditch or a ploughed field. (Even
the big guys like Google suffer from this as much as OSM route-planners do.)
I've spent silly amounts of time trying to get this right and am, finally,
pretty chuffed with it. Compared to (say) Strava, it's particularly suited
for bike tourers - the guys on the Cyclists' Touring Club forum in the UK,
for example, have fallen on it with alacrity.


Hope some of this is useful - let me know if you need more info on anything.

cheers
Richard




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