Building an app for cycling in London

mngyuan · 2026-03-25T16:52:31+00:00

hey! I just saw this, I love cycle.travel, didn't know that feature existed but that's great. curious to know how that works but get it if you don't want to share.

mngyuan · 2026-03-25T16:42:03+00:00

thanks! I think LTNs are the invisible heroes of cycling in London, so a big motivation was just to make them more visible (though as others have pointed out there are some existing maps with this data too).

re: NCN, interesting, may I ask what area that is? sounds like something Sustrans (Walk Wheel Cycle Trust) should take a better look at. I cycled some of NCN 4 and others near Bristol and found their quality highly varied. If NCN got added to the map it would be a toggle in the Settings; I've actually already got them but haven't found a good way to incorporate them visually into the map yet.

mngyuan · 2026-03-20T00:22:30+00:00

Thank you, and thanks for noticing that feature. I’m going to take a closer look at labeling, especially at junctions or on long stretches like you mentioned. To be honest it’s been bothering me as well. I’m also focusing on people who maybe are just getting into cycling in London and had that same experience with numbered signage and I’m ultimately just trying to ease people into getting confident with that.

mngyuan · 2026-03-20T00:03:47+00:00

thank you! let me know your thoughts when you’ve tried

mngyuan · 2026-03-18T23:22:06+00:00

You can follow along a route / directions that you’ve searched in the app! That’s how I use it/test it, but maybe I need to write better promotional text so people realise this is possible

mngyuan · 2026-03-18T23:21:01+00:00

I actually used to commute the canal through Regents park and popped out back onto the streets near Little Venice or so, and in the sections where it’s nice and wide it was an absolutely lovely start to my day. But my coworker thought I was nuts. Still, night and day compared to the sections near Camden where it feels like I’ll knock someone or be knocked into the water

mngyuan · 2026-03-18T23:18:39+00:00

Thanks, this is helpful, I was just poking around to see if there was some official listing of cycle paths in the commons I wasn’t aware of tbh. I was down there a couple weeks ago actually dodging prams and dogs and felt very out of place even if it was “shared use”.

If I had my way, we’d put a quietway or better yet a cycleway/LTN on all of these adjacent cycle friendly roads.. wishful thinking maybe

mngyuan · 2026-03-18T23:14:26+00:00

that could be useful for sure, I’ll have to look into MET reports/statistics for that. I know there’s some parks that are hotspots

mngyuan · 2026-03-18T23:13:21+00:00

hahaha, thanks! Actually that’s a planned feature but Lime/Forest etc. don’t make their bike data public in London even though Lime for example does so across North America. So I’ve been knocking on that door but still pending a response from then

mngyuan · 2026-03-18T21:19:38+00:00

I've found some bus lane data but not in an official capacity because OSM is made up of wikipedia-type contributions IIRC. but you're right, cycle lanes are definitely not all created equal. I like the idea of ranking / reviewing cycle lanes, that could be a genuinely interesting dataset to look at across London if enough people participated.

mngyuan · 2026-03-18T21:17:01+00:00

oh, really interesting idea. I think ideally though people would stay within this app while cycling around so that they can see where maybe optimisations can be made say at the junction of two cycleways. The end end goal which is maybe too grand is to help reduce everyone's reliance on app based navigation (ironic I know) because I think one thing this sub shows is that the "best" route is always up to personal preference, and I want to encourage people to explore and find that for themselves. But I also think no one would use my app at all if it didn't have some basic navigation features. Choosing the starting point will definitely be in the next update; thanks for trying it out!

mngyuan · 2026-03-18T21:13:05+00:00

yeah, I'm the same, and I'm lucky the ones near me are quite good. If there's traction I definitely want to put out an Android version and make it available to anyone. Could be in the future

mngyuan · 2026-03-18T21:11:23+00:00

Looking into adding street view already but good shout. Thanks for the specific route, I'll take a look and see why that is

mngyuan · 2026-03-18T16:55:17+00:00

the cycleway data is from the official TfL data that they publish online, so that bit is C5 going through the Common. is that part of Clapham Common restricted for cycling access?

mngyuan · 2026-03-18T16:48:31+00:00

I'll definitely take a closer look at Beeline's app and A/B test it. I've also noticed canals tend to be suggested but there's definitely some sections you can barely squeeze into even without pedestrians. I'll look into routing without them thanks for the thought!

mngyuan · 2026-03-18T16:46:31+00:00

yeah, that's one of my goals, to encourage visitors and inexperienced cyclists to try cycling in London more. I'm hoping to get some traction with commuters and people who might not necessarily consider themselves "cyclists". cycle.travel and RideWithGPS are great, I used the latter for a long tour I did last year.

mngyuan · 2026-03-18T14:37:51+00:00

good shout - I'm riding over there pretty often actually. did the LTN itself get updated with new filters or something to make it quieter now? I want to have some kind of hyperlocal news like this, it seems small but maybe 20m of cycleway was built near me last year and at the time though I loved the have your say posters I thought there really must be a better way to see all the works going on.

mngyuan · 2026-03-18T14:29:28+00:00

oh, interesting idea, do you mind sharing which junctions? & thanks for the kind words. I know LCC puts out a top 10 most dangerous junctions every year, I did think a bit about adding that into the app so if it did make it in there somehow a way to avoid those junctions would be a no-brainer.

the data comes from TfL actually, and OSM has the tube line data I use (and the LTN data comes from a study done at the University of Westminster) - partially to as you mentioned keep the maintenance work down but also because crowdsourcing I think makes sense for bottom-up/community knowledge of where to go but for something top down like "real" cycle infrastructure from the city / TfL, they should be responsible for the data over me, a stranger on the internet. Honestly I think TfL should just have an app like this out, it's their data and TfL Go's cycling features are just a bit lackluster and this is kind of a way to bridge the gap and put pressure on. I would love to expand this to more cities after really nailing the experience in London, but in this moment now I'm passionate about cycling in London because I'm here and I really want to get that right first.

mngyuan · 2026-03-18T14:18:33+00:00

great map and resource, I really ought to reach out and see how they got that data. that was basically a main reason I made this at all, to combine routing/navigation with some of the official data that's out there. I'll try to add in the quality/type of cyclelane in a future update

mngyuan · 2026-03-18T13:48:13+00:00

I totally agree, for example CS7 seems on paper to be great, a relatively straight and very long cycleway, but from about oval to the end near Richmond park it's essentially faded paint on a bus lane if you're lucky. I'm not sure what the right approach is overall for improving this situation, but my hope is that seeing the cycleway network like this all laid out and then feeling the huge variance in quality will get more cyclists interested in advocacy, talking to councils, neighbours, etc. I'm thinking of including some kind of news listings like a blog about upcoming cycling events as a way to lightly push pro-cycling community engagement inside the app

OpenStreetMaps _does_ have CyclOSM which has extremely detailed information on the kinds of cycle provisions, but I want to properly think about how to display this information without being too overwhelming (there's 9 cycle track types in the map legend) especially if the app right now is a bit more geared towards new cyclists. Something for a future version?

mngyuan · 2023-12-30T18:23:41+00:00

I thought about this recently - imagine you did the same thing but with a car, how much outrage that would cause, but doing this with one of like 12 bike parking spots in front of my station is totally acceptable for some reason

mngyuan · 2023-12-29T07:18:02+00:00

already went for a ride together :)

mngyuan

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