Cycle Routes in London

If you, like me, are a fan of cycling in London you will know how frustrating it is trying to plan journeys around the capital. There is no resource that currently exists to map out the best cycling routes around London. Efforts by TFL to date are terrible unless you like spending your time choking and dodging traffic in busy bus lanes.

We need a web resource that maps out the best cycling routes around London. All cyclists have internalised custom routes using the parks, canals and backstreets to weave the fastest and most pleasant way around their regular London haunts. However, once they stray from these regular routes, there is no easy way to plan a new journey. What is needed is a web-based participatory network where cyclists can share their preferred routes with others. With enough contributions from everyone, we could soon have enough pooled data to create a postcode to postcode route planning tool that provides cyclists with peer recommended routes across most of central London.

This is one of many ideas being suggested for a Social Innovation Camp being hosted by The Young Foundation and NESTA. The idea is to see what happens when you lock a bunch of IT specialists and social innovators away with a set of social problems and only 48 hours to solve them. Between 4th-6th April 2008, the Social Innovation Camp will bring together some of the best of the UK and Europe’s web developers and designers with people at the sharp end of social problems. The aim is to find ways that easy-to-build web 2.0 tools can be used to develop solutions to social challenges.