There are over 2 million bicycle users in NSW. Almost half our households have at least one bike but these are used on average only three or four times a year.^[2]The reasons most often given by the community as to why they do not cycle more often, or at all, are that the roads are too dangerous and that there is nowhere safe to ride.^[3]

While Sydney's main roads are congested and dangerous for cyclists, large areas of Sydney are covered by back streets, parks and drainage lines ideal for cycling. The problem is that only a few people know about them.

Figure 2. Critical Mass cyclists in Sydney business district. Photo copyright © Moz, 2003-2004

Knowledge of a city's bicycle routes is spread across THOUSANDS of people. Secret bike routes which include back alleys, drainage lines, and blocked off streets are traded in dingy pubs and on email lists. Many people never consider riding because they don't realise it is possible to cross the city safely on a bicycle. Existing maps suffer from most of the following factors:

TBD: Expand:

Figure 3. Cities are criss-crossed by secret bike routes. Photo copyright © Moz, 2003-2004

Figure 4. Bicycle Map Builder in a web page

Present a web page with a city map to a cyclist. The cyclist enters their favourite bicycle route on top of the map. Click, click, click, ... Submit. After hundreds of cyclists have all entered their favourite routes into the database, you have a comprehensive bicycle map of the city. Using the same process, cyclists can maintain the bicycle routes and the maps will never be outdated.

The expensive, labour intensive collection and validation of geographic data is moved from employees to enthusiastic volunteers, making it possible to build and maintain extensive, quality maps on a shoe-string budget.

Using the same community editing principles, thousands of volunteers have written Wikipedia, an encyclopedia with more entries than Encyclopedia Britannica.

The software required by the Bicycle Map Builder is available from vibrant Open Source projects which means the software is free. The software is backed with both volunteer and commercial support.

The bandwidth used to build a city map is negligible. A map for a city the size of Sydney can be built using $5000 worth of bandwidth^[4].

The biggest cost would be the purchase of a computer server, installation of software and technical support, all of which could be provided by the sponsoring organisation's existing computer department.

Figure 5. Detailed base maps of Sydney^[5]

TBD: Discuss costs of building maps using traditional methods.

The user community will be responsible for self correction. There are a number of processes available to us and they will be trailed during a pilot release of Bicycle Map Builder.

Self correction methods include:

We hope so. Currently many detailed maps are prohibitively expensive and out of reach of average community groups. If our vision materialises, millions of people around world will build comprehensive maps of their local area and give them away for free. Data custodians will need to consider alternative business structures and maps will be given away for free.

The map building development model is the same as the highly successful Open Source software movement where millions of software developers write software and give it away for free. Collectively, Open Source developers have built:

Figure 6. 

A bicycle map the size of Sydney will take approximately 160 volunteers one year.^[6] That is one volunteer per 25,000 members of the population. As a comparison, Bicycle NSW has 10,000 voluntary, financial members. Sydney's Critical Mass monthly bicycle ride which advocates better cycling conditions attracts up to 1,000 committed cyclists.

TBD: Collect statements of support from the cycling community.

Typically, a Feature Entry client renders a basemap into a web page and allows a user to add or modify geographic features on the map. The client should be easily accessible to the majority of the user community. This means the client should

This functionality is provided by Community Map Builder, a web based Web Map Service and Transactional Web Feature Service client.

A Map Viewer allows users to view and print collected maps in combination with other base maps. This functionality is provided by a number of open source clients, including:

The business logic layer provides:

A Web Feature Service provides a web interface to a geographic database. It returns features as vectors.

A Transactional Web Feature Service also allows updates, additions and deletions of the geographic database.

Geoserver is an excellent, open source, java based WFS-T and WMS.

A Web Map Service provides a web interface to a geographic database which returns map raster images (as GIF, PNG, etc).

Geoserver and mapserv are two good Open Source Web Map Service products.

Like a normal database, but tailored to handle geographic features as well. PostGIS provides extensions to Postgresql to produce a powerful open source geospatial database.

A Web Map Service and Web Feature Service client which builds web pages on the server. This can be used to protect proprietary datasets from being accessed by applications without the required privileges.

mapserv is one open source map aggregator - as well as providing a number of other roles as well.

The Bicycle Mapbuilder architecture is build upon Open Geospatial Consortium standards which has wide acceptance in the Geospatial industry. Each component can be replaced or used in conjunction with equivalent components.

The Bicycle Mapbuilder product can be built with both commercial and/or open source components. Open source components are recommended because:

Volunteers are more likely to contribute to a map collection project if maps are given back to the community for free. Consequently the maps created should be stored under an open license. We suggest using one of the Creative Commons licenses.