Cyclescape is a comprehensive online campaigning toolkit to assist cycle campaign groups around the UK. In the words of one supporter, it should be "a hugely important step forward for all cycle campaigning groups".
It is being created by the people behind CycleStreets, the UK-wide cycle journey planner.
The intial project work was funded thanks to £27,000 of funding as a winner of Geovation - GeoVation is an Ordnance Survey initiative and forms part of the Ideas in Transit project with funding from the Technology Strategy Board and the Department for Transport.
Our bid was one of 155 ideas submitted to the GeoVation challenge, on the theme of "How can we improve transport in Britain?". Our bid was shortlisted, and we attended the GeoVation Camp in March 2011 to help develop the proposal amongst a total of 30 ideas invited. We were one of the final ten proposals, and took part in a Dragon's Den -style pitch.
We were delighted to be picked as one of the winners who shared the £150k pot of funding.
Photos by Ordnance Survey, licenced CC BY-NC 2.0
We're since been continuing to work to provide groups with a really great, useful and user-friendly system that will save a lot of time and effort.
Some of the things Cyclescape enables are:
- Enable members of the public and campaigners easily to pinpoint where cycling is difficult
- Help groups prioritise what to work on
- Pull in planning application data automatically, so that potential issues needing attention are readily accessible
- Automatically notify and involve people who cycle through an area - who therefore have an interest in seeing issues fixed
- Make geographical data such as collision data and accessibility analysis easily available, to provide context
- Enable simpler and more focussed discussion based on specific issues, groups of issues, or themes
- Enable best practice to be 'pulled-in' to discussions, by providing off-the-shelf examples shared from elsewhere in the UK
- Enable groups to include LA contacts in these discussions if they wish
- Enable groups to assemble 'solution' resources so that problems can be resolved on the ground
- Give groups a variety of ways of publishing their activity on their website easily.
You can read the original Venture Plan and view the slides below from our pitch:
I was invited to join by our local Godalming campaign. I set up an account, and duly waited for confirmation. Nothing happened. Our coordinator, David Moxon, says he hasn't had a request for confirmation. He tried to set me up directly, no success, and I am unable to log on, nor set up a new account as the site tells me my email is taken. The confirmation should surely be just for joining our local group; not for joining the site at all?