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Welcome to cycle.travel

Cycling is awesome. Amazingly, beautifully so. This humble machine, invented some 150 years ago, gets us to work, into town, and to see friends… faster, cheaper and plain more fun than the alternatives. It gets us to Britain’s best scenery entirely under our own steam. It gets us away from the daily grind.

Cycling gets us places. That’s why this site is called cycle.travel.

Not everyone wants to be Bradley Wiggins. There’s a lot of cycle.sport and cycle.performance on the web. We aim to be something different. For us, it’s not about the bike; it’s about the ride, and making better, more liveable cities and countryside with the bicycle as our chosen weapon.

What we do

We’re here to get more people cycling, more often. We aim to do that by providing:

We don’t and can’t know everything. We’re not the experts on cycling in your city; you are. But what we can do is make it easy to share your knowledge, so more people will have the information they need to take up cycling.

What we believe

We believe infrastructure is the sine qua non of mass cycling: roads and paths that are designed for safe, enjoyable, efficient cycling. We have the greatest respect for organisations such as Sustrans who build this infrastructure, and for those such as the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, CTC, and countless local cycle groups, who campaign for it.

We believe everyone, everywhere has the right to ride. From a 5-year old to an 80-year old, from London to Lerwick. We believe unfashionable industrial towns have just as much right to quality infrastructure as the capital. Sprinkling a few grants on ‘Cycle Cities’ is not enough. In our league table of people called John, Grimshaw, J. and Starley, J. come a lot higher than Forester, J.

Who we are

cycle.travel is edited by Richard Fairhurst: formerly editor of Waterways World and Heritage magazines, launch editor of British Waterways’ waterscape.com website, an OpenStreetMap activist since the project’s first months in 2004, Sustrans volunteer ranger, and a lifelong cyclist.

We’re entirely bootstrapped – we have no shareholders or external funding. Yes, we are a business: the site is supported through advertising. But if you’ll excuse the jargon, we’re a “mission-focused business”. Our goal is to promote cycling as well as to pay our rent.

The site looks lovely entirely due to the work of Simon Clayson Design. We’re built with all manner of top-notch open source tools such as Mapnik, OSRM, Leaflet and PostGIS. We’re a Ruby+Rack site, but our own framework (Kite), not Rails. Our map data is, of course, from OpenStreetMap.