Question about re-use/customization

Hi Richard. First I want to say, thank you for building this. I am a transportation/cycling advocate in Portland, Oregon, USA. I have long been frustrated by routing tools. I tested cycle.travel today and it actually replicated my exact route across town, which took a dozen trips of trial and error to hone in on. I don't use turn-by-turn routing much anymore but cycle.travel is definitely going to be my recommendation going forward.

I'm a software engineer, and am planning a sabbatical/vacation to build something to benefit the cycling community, which has given me and my family/kids so much. One option is a route planner/turn-by-turn navigation system, specifically for urban cycling in the US, since current options are not good (I'm also part of the bike bus movement and was looking at something there). I have done work with route planning algorithms/APIs and was expecting extensive customization of OSM data would be needed, along with OSRM (or an alternative, our transit agency actually led the development of Open Trip Planner). I'm still not sure I'd be able to take it on (my math and C++ background is not so strong), but I am/was considering it.

It looks, though, like cycle.travel already takes this approach. I know there's no API, but I'm wondering two things:

1) If you'd support the development of an additional cycle.travel client for the United States. The main issues I have with cycle.travel are around the UX. For I could not get it to find certain locations, for example. This would mostly be a non-commercial endeavor (ideally open source, but closed source if you require it).

2) If there is a way to provide additional advocate-level customization of map data. For example, we have a system of "greenways" in Portland, but some of them are quite bad- for example, one may go up a hill where biking literally one block to the north is flat. Or some go through poor intersections that can be avoided. I have never been sure how to handle this with formal OSM data, since it's clearly a value judgement. But I was thinking of working with cycling advocacy orgs to contribute an additional layer of data to use for routing.

I really appreciate all the work and care you've put into this! And then I come to find out you are a Rubyist ❤️ and wrote prawn ❤️ Thanks!