Looking back at Cycling Guide in 2023

A desktop has some cycling-related artifacts: the Cycling Guide app icon, 6 cycling-related books, a phone with the Cycling Guide initial screen, and a model bicycle.

We’re pausing to reflect, and looking back, 2023 was a year of major transition. 

  • We created Cycling Guide Foundation to be a permanent and sustainable home for our free Cycling Guide mobile app.
  • We launched the app in Apple’s App Store and in Google Play, with geographic coverage in Waterloo Region and Guelph, Ontario.
  • We released new versions of the app, addressing issues and adding small improvements.
  • We built relationships with cycling advocacy groups across Canada.

While it’s always easy to wish we had accomplished more, it’s important to recognize progress and milestones. Getting Cycling Guide into the hands of more cyclists is an achievement that we’re proud of. And the feedback that we’ve received from people is gratifying. For example:

“I use it often. Anything to avoid the roads these days.”

“I used this app yesterday to find my way to downtown Waterloo from where I live in Inverhaugh. It was excellent routing me through the dedicated paths and shared roads!”

“I’m always on the lookout for safer and smoother routes to ride for my commute, as well as lovely casual rides!”

“I really like the explore options to see new loops close to me.”

“I’m loving your App! I use it often! I very much appreciate the Cycling Guide.”

The relationships that we’ve been building behind the scenes are crucial to our goal of expanding Cycling Guide coverage to more areas. People who advocate for cycling in particular and active transportation in general are working to improve the world. And we love working with them. We’re excited about our progress, and will share more in the new year.

It may be winter here where we live and work (though there’s little snow to show for it at the moment), but we’re still thinking about cycling and how we can make it easier for folks to ride as a part of their daily lives. 

See you next year!

This post was originally published on the Cycling Guide Foundation site.

What problem is Cycling Guide solving for people?

Three children on bikes are cycling away from the viewer on an asphalt multi-use path. Grass and trees are visible on either side of the path.

There’s an important question that we like to keep in mind for our Cycling Guide mobile app. “What problem is Cycling Guide solving?” 

We’re focussed on enabling cyclists to get from their starting point to their destination using the best available low-stresscycling-centric routes. We believe that these routes are just what’s needed for people who want to cycle more in their daily lives but lack the experience, knowledge, or confidence to do so comfortably. And we believe that’s a large group of people. We’ve certainly encountered enough of them ourselves to know that they’re out there. 

More importantly, though, there’s research that confirms it.

For example, back in 2009 Roger Geller, the Bicycle Coordinator for the City of Portland, Oregon, wanted to categorize people based on what kind of cycling they did. This was in support of improving the cycling experience in the city. He approached this categorization from a very specific point of view: How comfortable do people feel when they’re cycling? The paper that he wrote is well worth reading to see how he arrived at his four types:

  • “Strong and the Fearless” — Very comfortable without bike lanes
  • “Enthused and the Confident” — Very comfortable with bike lanes
  • “Interested but Concerned” — Not very comfortable, interested in biking more
  • “No Way No How” — that is, non riders

Crucially, Geller’s categorization has been examined closely and validated through research by Jennifer Dill and Nathan McNeil, published in separate papers in 2013 (focused on Portland) and 2016 (national level). And what did they conclude?

“We found that the distribution was remarkably close to Geller’s estimate: 60% of adults in the city and 56% in the region fell into the Interested but Concerned category. In 2015, we replicated the survey, though using an abbreviated version, in a sample of adults in the 50 largest metro regions in the U.S. The results were pretty similar.”

That’s a large percentage of the population who would like to cycle more than they do now. And those are the people that we believe will get the most out of our Cycling Guide mobile app, following low-stress, cycling-centric routes to get around. But what we’ve experienced and seen with Cycling Guide is that even people with plenty of cycling experience are discovering ways to get around on their bikes that they just didn’t know about.

Of course, there are many apps out in the world for getting or creating cycling routes. For example, Strava is an app/service that’s aimed at athletes who bike, or run, or engage in other physical activities. Another is Ride with GPS, which promises to “make it easy to map, analyze, record, and share your bike rides”. And, of course there are general purpose mapping/directions apps from Google (“Google Maps – Transit & Food”) and Apple (“Apple Maps”). But our focus on low-stress, cycling-centric routes is what will get more people cycling regularly. And by the way, while currently we only provide routes in Waterloo Region and Guelph, Ontario, Canada, we do intend to increase the geographic coverage for Cycling Guide.

The problem of helping people use their bikes more often isn’t all that we hope to solve, though. A more all-encompassing problem is climate change and the role of vehicles in emitting greenhouse gasses and other pollutants. As well, the health of people who aren’t active enough in their daily lives is an important problem that needs attention.

And in support of all these problems we aim to reduce the number of car trips that people take, by replacing them with bike trips. We’ll talk about the climate and health problems in future posts!

This post was originally published on the Cycling Guide Foundation site.

August Cycling Guide update

A pole has four blue wayfinding signs, each pointing in a different direction. Each sign indicates what can be found by traveling along the trail in that direction.

It’s been a busy summer for us here at the Cycling Guide Foundation. We’ve been working away on many behind-the-scenes aspects of the Cycling Guide mobile app, and have just released the newest version to everyone via the App Store for iPhone and Google Play for Android. Be sure to install it now. This release addresses many small issues and provides big performance improvements, while also laying the foundation for exciting new future updates for the app.

Many of you will have first used Cycling Guide in its beta form, starting in late July of last year. The feedback that came in from our testers was instrumental in helping us improve the app in general and its routing in particular. Often the improvements came via updates to OpenStreetMap data, and generally we’ve been able to get those data fixes made fairly quickly. Of course the app became more widely available back in May, and I expect that most of the people who had been using the beta version switched to using the May version of the app. We continue to get great feedback from folks using the widely available version of Cycling Guide.

But we still value the feedback to early versions of updates and new features before they are released widely. In support of that, and recognizing that not everyone in the original test group may want to continue with it, we’re opening up a brand new beta program. If you enjoyed testing early releases, here’s your chance to sign up to do just that! As always, we do respond to the feedback we receive, so please do keep it coming.

Join our new beta program now.

Thanks for your continued interest in Cycling Guide. 

Happy cycling everyone.

This post was originally published on the Cycling Guide Foundation site.

Cycling Guide mobile app is now available

A pole has four blue wayfinding signs, each pointing in a different direction. Each sign indicates what can be found by traveling along the trail in that direction.

We have some exciting news today. 

The initial release of Cycling Guide is now available in the App Store for iPhone and in Google Play for Android. That means anyone can install and use the app now to get great low-stress bike routes.

It’s been a long ride (!) to get here, but it’s been worth it. Working closely with CycleWR and supported by extensive real world cycling by our beta testers we’ve created an app that will appeal to people who would like to cycle more but feel like they lack the expertise, experience, or knowledge to do so comfortably. (Of course, it will be a great experience for more seasoned cyclists as well.)

Here are some more details on what you’ll be able to do with Cycling Guide:

  • Get great low-stress cycling routes
  • Find bicycle parking to support your rides
  • Try curated recreational rides from Explore Waterloo Region
  • Find cycling-friendly businesses, courtesy of Ontario By Bike

Simply put, Cycling Guide provides low-stress cycling routes to anyone who wants to cycle more in Waterloo Region. And now we’re all looking forward to a summer of fun cycling.

By the way, while it’s not in Waterloo Region, the geographic coverage area for Cycling Guide also includes Guelph and parts of Wellington County. That means even more people can find low-stress routes. And we hope to see Cycling Guide reach other communities as well.

So whether you use an iPhone or an Android phone, now’s the perfect time to install Cycling Guide and find out just how liberating a low-stress bike ride can be. Happy cycling everyone.

This post originally appeared on the Zeitspace blog.

Responding quickly to feedback for Cycling Guide routes

An urban street scene with cars parked at the side of the street. Between the street and the sidewalk there is a raised cycleway.

David Trueman, of CycleWR, wrote at the Zeitspace blog recently about OpenStreetMap (OSM) and why we use its data in Cycling Guide. One of the reasons is that we can update OSM as new cycling infrastructure opens in the real world or as we discover issues in its data. Here’s how data-related improvements to our routing happen.

A big part of our testing early on was riding our bikes and experiencing Cycling Guide routes directly ourselves. That doesn’t scale, though, and we invited other people to get early access to Cycling Guide in order to test it and provide feedback. That testing has been a great success, especially in revealing issues in our routes. Here’s a recent example of feedback from one of our early access testers: 

King St between Marshall and Regina is finished construction and has above grade bike lanes that are pretty good although you have to be cautious of pedestrians and parked vehicles. Routes are avoiding that section and taking inferior streets .

I’d been watching King Street North in Waterloo over the summer wondering when the opening would happen, and hadn’t realized that it had. Neither had David. He checked OSM and saw that there was nothing in its data yet about the new north-bound and south-boud cycleways. It was time for a quick reconnaissance trip. I cycled over to King Street South and Willis Way, and from there headed north on the dedicated cycleway. And as reported by our Cycling Guide tester, the new section is now open and I was able to ride all the way to University Avenue. I was able to ride back as well on the southbound cycleway, with the exception of a short segment between University and Bricker.

Having confirmed the physical state of this bit of the world, I let David know. He made an update in OSM, which is now awaiting review by other OSM contributors. We’ll see those cycleways on Cycling Guide routes and maps soon.

But updates to OSM aren’t the only way that we improve our cycling routes. We’ve had multiple testers let us know about rough trails that aren’t really suitable for many cyclists. They’re not appropriate for cargo bikes, or bikes pulling trailers, or simply just for less-experienced or less-confident cyclists. Here’s one report:

Route did not suggest going directly down Doon South but rather to take a trail just after Winding Wood Cres. The trail had an intense, steep hill that would be challenging for most cyclists.

To address this recurring issue, we’ve been updating the way that we process OSM data for use in our routing. As a result, we’re avoiding more and more of these kinds of rough trails. As I’ve mentioned previously, reports of real-world experiences from our group of testers is a big part of making sure that Cycling Guide routes are as good as they can be.

Here’s part of another recent example of a routing challenge that was quite tricky to diagnose, but simple to resolve:

I’m surprised that it didn’t suggest using the bike paths north of University Ave (near MacGregor Cres.) since that route takes about half the time and has less interaction with cars. I’m wondering if this route was intentionally avoided or if those paths just aren’t included in the map. 

The routes that Cycling Guide provided in this case were far more indirect than they should have been, and it wasn’t at all clear why. This one was trickier to track down, but it eventually turned out that in the OSM data one short segment of the Laurel/Forwell Trails didn’t explicitly allow bikes, while all the other segments do. That prevented Cycling Guide from using those parts of the trails. This feedback resulted in another quick OSM update by David (again, pending review by other OSM contributors).

Sometimes we get reports of problems that are already close to being addressed. Here’s some recent feedback we received from another of our early access testers:

The road from Wellington at Walter to Park St, that runs between the GRH helipad and the badminton club, is a private road with gates. A route tried to take me through there today, but it is not passable.  

I checked, and the issue was that we weren’t handling that private road correctly. That is, the OSM data is correct, but the way we were processing it needed improvement. The good news is that I checked with the newest internal routing data, and confirmed that we already have a fix that excludes private roads like this one from routing. That fix will be out in the world soon.

Engaging with people who joined our early access to Cycling Guide group has been, and continues to be, a great success. Sometimes the problems people have reported have fixes that apply across the Region because of improvements in how we process OSM data. Sometimes the fixes are to OSM data itself. In all cases, though, the result is better cycling routes for everyone.

If you’re interested in getting early access to Cycling Guide yourself, sign up right now at CyclingGuide.app. We’d love to hear from you.

This post originally appeared on the Zeitspace blog.

Why Does Cycling Guide Use OpenStreetMap?

A map of Kitchener Ontario, with a green line representing a cycling route. The line enters at the top of the map and ends by a large black marker in Victoria Park.

Some of you will have been following along as we work with CycleWR to create Cycling Guide. It’s a big project, with plenty of work to do to bring it to Waterloo Region. One of our close collaborators has been David Trueman of CycleWR, who among other things brought to the project an appreciation for and deep understanding of OpenStreetMap. In this guest piece, David shares more about OSM and its importance to Cycling Guide. 

I want to tell you more about how Cycling Guide is built atop OpenStreetMap (OSM.) First of all, what is OpenStreetMap? 

OSM is a map of the world, created and maintained by volunteers and free to use under an open license. OSM provides map data for thousands of websites, mobile apps, and hardware devices. Virtually every online map that you see, other than Google, is based on OSM. That includes Apple and Facebook.

OSM is the Wikipedia of map data. Not only is it free to use but any member of the public is free to update it to add to or correct local information.

OSM is well aligned with one of the goals of Cycling Guide: to provide a hyperlocal resource for anyone who would like to find their way on a bicycle in Waterloo Region, no matter what their experience or confidence level. Cycling Guide will be open-source software; the source code will be available to examine and use by anyone who wants to.

Open data, open source software, open knowledge and OpenStreetMap share a common theme: we can and should all benefit from community efforts rather than having the fruit of those efforts locked up for private benefit. If knowledge of prior intellectuals had not been openly available, Isaac Newton would not have been able to declare in a 1675 letter: “if I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

So, that’s all the theory. How is OSM working out in practice?

First of all, the map data in OSM is remarkably complete and accurate (although not perfect!) This means that, as we tune Cycling Guide’s handling of the OSM data, the app is generating fantastic routes that, wherever possible, avoid the need to travel with heavy traffic.

Because Cycling Guide volunteers can directly change the OSM data, we are able to add new cycling facilities right away. We observed this directly with the new Farmer’s Market Trail. On the day the trail officially opened, we were already generating routes that use it — long before the apps from big companies which don’t have this tight local connection.

More often we are able to fix small inaccuracies quickly. Just the other day I was using Cycling Guide and noticed it was directing me to ride on the sidewalk on a quiet local street. It turns out that the OSM data for that sidewalk was wrong and I was able to correct it the same day.

Feedback from users is prominently featured in Cycling Guide, and our intention is that when users report less than optimal routing, we will be able to make corrections in a timely way and demonstrate results

Like Wikipedia, we have the benefit of peer review to ensure accuracy and consistency. On more than one occasion I have made a small error in my OSM changes and other local OSM editors have been quick to point out the error so I can correct it.

When you sign up for early access and use Cycling Guide, now you’ll know that you will be standing (riding?) on the shoulders of giants.

Cyclists from around Waterloo Region are now testing Cycling Guide

A bicyclist's view looking down at a phone mounted on bike handlebars. The phone's screen shows a map with a marked route on it.

The Cycling Guide mobile app, which Zeitspace is creating with CycleWR, has reached a milestone. After an extended period of internal testing, we’ve put it in the hands of several people who are experienced and confident cyclists to see how well it works for them. But the app is actually aimed at people who aren’t experienced and confident cyclists. Why have we gone with these experienced and confident cyclists for early testing? It’s because we’re particularly interested in learning about the quality of the routes that Cycling Guide provides, and we want to start with people whose cycling experience and knowledge of cycling in Waterloo Region will better equip them to assess those routes.

Here’s a little bit of an overview of the routes. One of the things that we want Cycling Guide to do is provide low stress routes for people who otherwise may not feel confident or comfortable enough to ride in Waterloo Region. The routes that Cycling Guide presents on the map show cyclists what they can expect in terms of stressful (or not) car traffic when cycling along a route.  When creating a route, the app classifies streets and paths into four groups:

  • Good for anyone
    You’ll ride with few or no cars
  • Good for most cyclists
    You’ll ride in lighter car traffic
  • Good for confident cyclists
    You’ll ride closer to cars
  • Good for strong cyclists
    You’ll ride in heaver car traffic

The resulting Cycling Guide routes are often low stress, using protected cycling lanes, shared paths, and other car-free options. That is, Cycling Guide routes will typically favour the lowest stress paths and streets, the ones that are good for anyone. That’s great for less experienced cyclists.

Of course, this is what we intended. How close have we gotten to achieving this? So far the feedback is great. Here’s what some of our testers are saying:

  • “Passed through a park with construction on the trail which was not noted on the map. It was passable but looked like it had recently been closed.”
  • “Route did not suggest going directly down Doon South but rather to take a trail just after Winding Wood Cres. The trail had an intense, steep hill that would be challenging for most cyclists. Doon South at least is flat. Then lost the trail/route through a GVTA trail that was not appropriate for cyclists. Felt out of the way and not very direct.”
  • “I hit a dead end near a pond looking for this route, and couldn’t see it. I ended up getting back on Laurel Trail, to land near the top of this mystery segment, so I got back on track.”

And finally:

  • “I just want to emphasize I really love the problem this app is looking to solve.”

As the first three examples show, we have plenty of room to improve. But it’s great feedback as it all addresses exactly what we’re looking to learn about in our current testing phase: the quality of Cycling Guide routes. I also like the fourth piece of feedback, as it confirms that we’re going in the right direction!

Our work continues, and Cycling Guide improves every week.

If you’re interested in getting early access to Cycling Guide yourself, sign up right now at CyclingGuide.app. We’d love to hear from you.

This post originally appeared on the Zeitspace blog.

Cycling Guide and the joy of exploring Waterloo Region by bicycle

A bicyclist's view looking down at a phone mounted on bike handlebars. The phone's screen shows a map with a marked route on it.

I want to provide an update on Cycling Guide, the mobile app that Zeitspace is working with CycleWR to create. One of the fun aspects of working on Cycling Guide has been something that software product teams don’t always enjoy: testing

More specifically, as the team has worked on the app we’ve needed to assess the quality of the cycling routes that it provides. As a bit of background, we’re building Cycling Guide on a foundation of geospatial data from OpenStreetMap. It’s a fantastically detailed and accurate resource. We’ve been able to process the underlying OSM data that we use to better understand and visualize our routes, which has been a great starting point for our routing approach. But we’re also doing exploratory testing of our cycling routes, something familiar to software product teams.

In our case, it started by looking at the routes on screen. As Cycling Guide is  focussed on Waterloo Region, we’re assessing routes on streets that we know at least a little. As work progressed we could easily identify anomalies in the routes we looked at and address them in development. We also defined some specific trips that we could review again and again, looking to see how updates to data or our routing engine affected the routes. For example, there’s a two-way protected cycling lane along the otherwise one-way Erb St between Peppler and Caroline in Waterloo that we’d expect to see used for some routes in either direction. And we have a few test trips where we would reasonably expect that routes would use the Iron Horse TrailSpur Line Trail, or Laurel Trail. My own favourite test trips are to local breweries. 

In addition to software updates and data updates, being able to tweak routing settings while testing and seeing the results on a familiar street and path network has made the work a lot of fun. We’ve also compared our routes to what some other mobile mapping apps provide, and the results are encouraging. In many cases we prefer the routes that Cycling Guide provides.

Exploratory testing on screen was a place to start and helped the team make great progress. Things got more fun when we started doing exploratory testing while on bikes in the real world. The earliest field testing that our team did was pretty simple, as the app was extremely limited in functionality. For example, riding along Iron Horse Trail and periodically checking the current location marker on a map wasn’t really delivering much value, but the functionality worked. As Cycling Guide grew in capability I started trying more ambitious rides myself. Two recent cycling trips provided unexpectedly strong validation that the app is already delivering value.

The first was a ride with my son from Uptown Waterloo to St. Jacobs and back. The route took us on paths that we didn’t know about, or hadn’t been able to find previously. And the app was great to use while riding even in a still-limited form. The second was a ride I did from Uptown Waterloo to Cambridge and back. Again, Cycling Guide took me on paths that were new to me. Both rides were mostly on protected lanes or shared paths that were clear of cars. And both rides were quite scenic in places. The rides were unexpectedly exhilarating experiences. My typical rides are either running errands or longer recreational rides. Having a way to expand my cycling repertoire will provide great value for me.

As I like to cycle anyway, this exploratory testing phase has been great fun. In addition to testing our app, it has me exploring Waterloo Region by bicycle and making new discoveries. Even at this early stage we’ve been able to make some small improvements in OpenStreetMaps data as well. So it’s been a win on multiple levels.  Sometime soon we’ll be expanding our testing to include some outside testers who aren’t a part of the project team. We’re excited to see the results.

This post originally appeared on the Zeitspace blog.

I’ve overhauled and upgraded my blog

A blog post on a laptop compute screen

Since 2009, this personal blog of mine has run on Blogger, a platform owned by Google. Over the years, it had become obvious that Blogger wasn’t a priority for the folks in Mountain View. Concerned about the inevitability of the platform being shut down I decided to migrate away from it. I considered multiple options and landed on WordPress, which I was already familiar with and which is open source. (WordPress is also a company that offers paid services such as hosting, and also supports the open source software.)

Migration of the blog turned out to be a bigger task than I had thought for a variety of reasons. There were many issues that I needed to deal with and, having started the migration and overhaul in 2019, it took until now to complete.

There were hundreds of broken or redirected links to address. It’s not that surprising that decade-old links to event registration pages were gone, but discovering articles that were only a few years old have vanished was unexpected. It felt like I was doing a restoration, always making decisions about how to handle each broken link. Many I simply removed. For others I found new links to use instead.

The biggest issue was discovering multiple eras of questionable Blogger HTML to sanitize. Plentiful nested DIV elements were only a small part of that mess. In the end, the posts are stripped down and clean, ready for new eyes to read them (and new web browsers to interpret the HTML).

I also spent time refurbishing the images. Many of them had originally been posted in smaller sizes than today’s web users might expect. As most photos were my own, I went back to the originals in many cases and added upgraded versions to the blog.

Happily, I had always run the blog on my own domain name, though Blogger-style URLs needed to be updated with WordPress URLs and appropriate re-directs. That was relatively easy compared with other work.

Finally, I added a few pieces that I had neglected to cross-post over the last few years. They had been written originally for the Zeitspace blog or the Fluxible blog. Collecting them together here makes for a more representative picture of what I’ve been up to.

I’m sure there will be issues that emerge that I’ve missed, and there are things that I’m still working on in the background. But it feels good to have this done.

Fluxible Benefit Concert was a great success

Kathryn Ladano performing on bass clarinet

Last week’s Fluxible Benefit Concert for Open Ears And NUMUS was a great artistic success, featuring performances by musicians in our own Waterloo Region, but also from outside the region. 

And even better, the financial outcome of the concert was also a great success. With ticket sales and matching dollars from Fluxible and Fluxible TV sponsor ZeitspaceOpen Ears and NUMUS are splitting $5,610. At a time when they can no longer deliver live music experiences in person, we know that this will have an impact. 

Nobody knows when either organization will be able to present live music experiences again. But I know that the musicians they present bring artistry and a devotion to their craft and that the result is great musical experiences in our community. 

Finally, Open Ears and NUMUS have a joint Indiegogo campaign going on — check it out.

This post originally appeared on the Fluxible website.