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The advance of the ‘Idaho Stop’ has come to a, well, stop in San Francisco. Mayor Ed Lee has vetoed proposals to introduce the practice, where cyclists are allowed to roll through ‘Stop’ signs – treating them as ‘Give Way’/‘Yield’ – and also to turn right on a red light. The SF Bicycle Coalition says the veto is “a major step away from [his] promise to eliminate traffic deaths and severe injuries”.
Japan is the latest country to establish a network of bike touring routes.
Roads selected for the Japanese national cycle network will have low traffic numbers, bike rental facilities, and a good safety record. The routes will also be designed to take in scenic areas, historic sites and other tourist attractions. Once the routes have been chosen, Japan’s tourism ministry will pay for signage and facilities for riders.
The Japan Times reports that one of Japan’s first touring routes, crossing the Seto inland sea, has seen visitors double in five years thanks to the views and the facilities en route. Another 30 routes have been earmarked for potential inclusion in the network.
Work will start on the network in 2016.
Liverpool is to become one of the first cities in Britain to get bike-friendly traffic lights which give cyclists a head start. Unusually, thermal imagery detectors will sense the presence of cyclists, and only trigger the advance lights when cyclists are present.
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.
Made in the Cotswolds. Published by Éditions Système D Ltd.
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