Now isn’t that a title to stir your heart?
As I am sure most of you know, while I am a cyclist – sometimes – I am a fairly cautious one. That is because I am a fat old man with a dicky ticker. Where I live there are steep hills in three of the four cardinal compass points. We live in a bowl – and Valley Drive is the only flat way out. It is uphill from here to Kerrisdale or Shaughnessy and even Kits requires tackling a short but killer grind up Nanton to the new Greenway. So the idea of a tool that takes topography into account as one of the keys to route choice had an instant appeal to me.
I came across it due to a new twitter account called Vancouver Studies run by my old friend Raul Pacheco-Vega. “This account tweets scholarly studies about the city of Vancouver (BC, Canada).”
So that link took me to the academic publisher Elsevier who, of course, charge an arm and a leg to read research articles – but at least the Abstract provided a link to the program itself. I thought.
With increasing fuel costs, greater awareness of greenhouse gas emissions and increasing obesity levels, cycling is promoted as a health promoting and sustainable transport mode. We developed a cycling route planner (http://cyclevancouver.ubc.ca) for Metro Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, to facilitate cycling amongst the general public and to facilitate new route location by transportation planners. The geographical information system-based planner incorporates variables that influence choices to travel by bicycle (e.g., distance, elevation gain, safety, route features, air pollution and links to transit) in selecting the preferred routing. Using a familiar and user-friendly Google Maps interface, the planner allows individuals to seek optimized cycling routes throughout the region based on their own preferences. In addition to the incorporation of multiple user preferences in route selection, the planner is unique amongst cycling route planners in its use of topology to minimize data storage redundancy, its reliance on node/vertex index tables to increase efficiency of the route selection process, and the use of web services and asynchronous technologies for quick data delivery. Use of this tool can help promote bicycle travel as a form of active transportation and help lower greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) and air pollutant emissions by reducing car trips.
I have disabled the link in the quote because that site no longer responds. But Topophilo will give you both the sad story of why this useful tool is no longer available and what else is around to help you.
October 31st, 2014
CycleVancouver, Metro Vancouver’s cycling trip planner, has been taken offline because it is no longer receiving funding to be maintained and hosted.
Other useful resources that may be helpful in planning your route are:
and then it also says
The original Cycle Vancouver code has been posted to GitHub for reference.
Which might be good news if we can come up with a rescue plan. Doesn’t this seem to be a Good Idea for crowdfunding? Or maybe support from the City – or even Metro? Isn’t Translink supposed to be into this alternative mode stuff too?
Of course being dead for three years may mean all of this has been tried before – but now the Mayors have come up with some funding for Translink, and even the feds seem interested in less carbon intensive ways of getting around (which wasn’t the case back in 2014) shouldn’t we be trying to resuscitate the patient?
UPDATE Sunday January 8
and because that link won’t work in an image
AFTERWORD May 16, 2017
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Stephen Rees's blog 
Unfortunately the code alone is not much good, lacking the source data to drive it, which was stripped from the repository. What is it about this project that distinguishes it, makes it better, than the Google router in bike mode?
Paul Ramsey
January 8, 2017 at 7:22 am
“Google does a decent job directing a relatively experienced cyclist from A to B, but it has a hard time to learn about places where cyclists can go but cars can’t. And it won’t be able to answer my fundamental question: Can I bring my 6 year old along?” http://doodles.mountainmath.ca/blog/2015/12/14/routing/
Stephen Rees
January 8, 2017 at 4:10 pm
i used cycle vancouver from the time it opened to the public until its demise! google maps wasn’t much worse! i’d rather have a crowdsourced from veteran commuters (not vehicular bicyclists) vancouver bicycle route planner. Jens please make one :-)!
Administrator
January 8, 2017 at 7:51 pm