January 01, 2008
Hello everybody!
Since few weeks ago I’ve been thinking about how can be improved the life of urban cyclers. When a bicycle rider moves to a new city or a non cycler decides to give a try to his/her almost forgotten bike, the first problem it faces is finding a friendly route to get wherever he wants to. In order to minimize the brutal impact of discovering that riding a bike inside a city most of the times becomes a battle against all non bicycle vehicles, I decided to start the Bike Path Project (BPP). The BPP’s goal is to deliver an information system that presents a map of the existing bike paths inside a city. It wants to encourage new urban bicycle riders to not give up at the first impression of “fighting against the world” and at the same time give a tool to inform all bikers on the infraestructures that a city offers to them.
While there is many information on countryside/free time routes for bikes, there is a lack of information on urban bike paths/lanes. Having on mind the huge amount of information that a bike path map involves and more over, how hard to collect that information is, I thought a collaborative system wikipedia-like, where visitors or users can draw the bike paths they know.
The idea of Bike Path Project is just born and I will let you know how it evolves. If you would like to receive news on the project, please use your rss reader or send me an email to guizzzmo gmail com.
Note: Currently I’m studying similar projects but I didn’t find anything that fulfills the main characteristic of collaborative urban bike maps. If you know any project that is connected or similar to the Bike Path Project please let me know.
Good post.