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The newly opened Bay Cycle Way, an 80-mile tour around Morecambe Bay, opened this weekend – and we’re pleased to celebrate with the latest addition to our detailed UK route guides.
The brand new route follows quiet roads and cycle tracks along the coast, ducking and diving into market towns and quiet villages. Route 700 of the National Cycle Network, it opened on 13th June with a four-day celebration ride.
With few steep hills and much to see along the way, Sustrans says it is “a brilliant challenge for people new to long distance rides” – a ‘slow travel’ route rather than a lung-buster. According to local manager Nikki Wingfield:
“Morecambe Bay has its very own distinctive character, with incredible views, world class historic sites and artefacts, traditional food and rare wildlife. We have planned lots of opportunities to stop – there’s a loo, a brew and a view every 10 miles!”
Our new Bay Cycle Way route guide includes a full downloadable map, accommodation and bike shop listings, plus a guide to what you’ll see along the way. Head over to the Routes pages to get started, browse the gallery, and download the routebook.
We’re delighted to bring our acclaimed route-planner and bike map to the US and Canada.
You can now use cycle.travel/map to find an enjoyable, safe bike route between any two places in North America – whether you’re just riding one mile across town, or planning the coast-to-coast expedition of a lifetime.
We’ve taken our UK and Western Europe route-planner, and spent months customising and upgrading it for the US and Canada. When you ask cycle.travel for a route, it uses all these factors, and more, to find your ideal journey:
The route is fully draggable – so you can go via anywhere you want. And once you’ve planned your route, you can check out the elevation profile, download it for use on a GPS or smartphone, or print turn-by-turn directions.
Behind all this is a specially designed backdrop map, with compact road names for easy city navigation, special symbols for bike facilities, hillshading to show the lie of the land, quiet roads showing sooner than on other maps, and special tricks to reduce clutter in urban areas.
Our maps are made possible by the amazing commitment of OpenStreetMap’s volunteers, who are creating the best map of the world, and whose surveys we’re proud to build on. Indeed, we’re launching this at State Of The Map US in New York, the conference for OSM contributors and users.
cycle.travel’s route-planner has rapidly become a favourite with European and UK cyclists. Over the last month, we’ve been testing these new routes with US cyclists and their feedback tells us it’ll be just as useful in North America. We’re delighted to be bringing it across the pond and would love to hear your feedback.
In the coming months we’ll be bringing four more features from our European maps to North America:
We’ll also be adding to the editorial content to give it a more international flavour – including bike touring stories and news from across the world. And we’ve got one more big development planned… but we’ll keep that under wraps for now.
Our new route-planner and mapping covers the ‘lower 48’ (the US except Hawaii and Alaska) plus Canada south of 55° latitude. You can plan routes in Alaska and the far north of Canada, too, but they won’t be responsive to changes in elevation.
We use OpenStreetMap data. OSM is made entirely by volunteers, thousands of them bicyclists, making it the best source for bike paths and routes. In those rural areas of the US that OSM’s volunteer surveyors haven’t yet reached, it may be missing some small asphalt roads or other road surface information. We’ve made a big effort to ensure that you won’t be directed across a ploughed field or along a drainage ditch, but you could still find omissions or errors in the backwoods. If you do, sign up with OpenStreetMap and fix it: it gets better thanks to the contributions of bicyclists like you!
Powering all this is the amazing OSRM (Open Source Routing Machine), an epic piece of software devised by Dennis Luxen which generates and serves out a massive routing database. It takes our monster 128GB, 16-core server two whole days working flat out to calculate the best bike routes for North America – but we hope you’ll agree it’s worth it.
Here's a new thread specifically for issues you might have spotted with our US and Canada directions and cartography. If you find a route that isn't what you'd expect, or want to make any other comment, post it here!
Utrecht has long been the world capital of bike parking, with a 4,200-space park at the station and 12,500 more under construction. But with all this parking comes one question – how do you find a free space?
Yesterday the city unveiled its answer: digital displays showing available spaces.
Unveiled yesterday by alderman Lot van Hooijdonk (pictured in photo by Mark Wagenbuur), 21 digital signs across the city show the number of free spaces at six key bike parks. Though such signs are common for multi-storey car parks the world over, this is believed to be the first such system for cyclists.
Free spaces are monitored in two ways. First, cyclists swipe their ‘OV Chip Card’ to check their bike in and out of the indoor bike parks. This enables a charge to be made when parking for an extended time. Second, the racks themselves contain electronic sensors in which monitor when a bike is taken in or out – a nifty system which also allows the cycle parks to be monitored for abandoned bikes. The counts of free spaces are then transmitted electronically to the network of displays.
100,000 people cycle through the centre of Utrecht every day, out of a population of 330,000. This week the city was named the third best in the world for cycling, behind only Copenhagen and Amsterdam. Copenhagenize calls it “a world leader for cycling among smaller urban areas”.
Zebras, pelicans, toucans, puffins, pegasuses (pegasi?)… there’s a bewildering number of types of road crossing, and now London has a Tiger crossing to add to the mix. It’s like a normal zebra crossing with flashing yellow lights, but with a bike crossing alongside. The idea is that motorists will recognise the zebra and stop for cyclists to cross the road. This new one forms part of London Cycle Network route 9 in Hackney, and the London Cycling Campaign calls it “simple and effective”.
Made in the Cotswolds. Published by Éditions Système D Ltd.
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