I

am proud to announce that I’ve joined the team at onefinestay to help build the unhotel.

So whats that? Well, onefinestay allows travellers to stay in characterful homes rather than bland hotel rooms. So it’s converted Churches, Mayfair boltholes, and houseboats rather than Hiltons or Holiday Inns. The aim is to lets guests live like a local but with the convenience and privacy a serviced hotel would offer such as toiletries, towels and a concierge. There are even some snazzy touches like an iPhone provided to guests during their stay with our app featuring local area information and a home instructional guide activated by pointing the phone at various barcodes located around the property (like on a wii or an oven).

Behind the scenes is a dedicated and smart team working on hard but solvable problems to keep the show running and increase capacity for the future. I’ve joined the operation team to help design and implement systems and processes to make our model work at greater scale. For example how do we accurately and repeatedly ensure that a home is left exactly as we found it? or what is the most effective way to move bedding around town, especially when there’s more than fits on a scooter?

I love the opportunity to work on building and improving a business I previously rated as one of the best emerging from Europe (and I’ve seen a few!). Also onefinestay is a great match for my interests/obsession with technology enabled businesses, good job as to work at a startup you need to be obsessed with what they are trying to achieve because the hours aren’t reasonable and the positions aren’t well paid!

My last post focused on the problems of cycling in London, and how fear and poor cycle routes are two of the key issues preventing a mass uptake of cycling in the capital.  The comments echoed these concerns with storys of potholes, fractious cycle lanes and nightmarish conditions.  This post is about how we, the passionate cycling community, can start making the improvements required.  Consider it an open design blueprint which needs feedback, support, and iteration - all this can be added at the bottom.

Vision

The project aims to collect data on the quality of cycling routes all over the capital.  This ranges from hazards, traffic density, surface quality, and usage.  This data can then be used to help experienced and new cyclists make safe and convenient route choices.  The data can also be used to encourage city planners to fix and improve the most urgent issues with the network.  The end vision is to use the data to create the ultimate set of routes in London which can then be properly signposted and marked so that anyone can navigate London by bike using a simplified tube style map.

Problems the “London Cycle Map” aims to solve

• Users are unable to find and follow suitable cycle routes
• City planners are unaware of the major issues with the network

Features

• A Google maps style cycle map of London which can be viewed on the iPhone (initially a scaled down version of Open Cycle Map)
• A mobile route planner to find and follow the best route from A>B according to the users criteria (avoid major roads, hazards etc)
• Tagging of routes: User can easily add information about; hazards, traffic levels, quality of road surface, the location of cycle facilities, and the quality of cycle lanes (much like fixmystreet). Location and images can easily be added with the iPhone.

Minimum viable product - Because a good product is a quick product.

• Map of London cycle routes on an iPhone application
• Tagging

The Plan - How is all this going to happen?

• The London Cycle Map project has its first developer!  Welcome Ian Kynnersley, app developer extraordinaire.  He is starting to looking into creating an iPhone version of OpenCycleMap and the tagging interface. Great to have him on board.
• Meetings and partnerships: This is a community project and to be effective needs to get feedback and support from some of the major figures in London cycling and blogging.  Introductions and meeting with OpenCycleMap, Dave Hill, CycleStreets.net, Londonist, RealCycling, LdnBuzz,  LondonNet, Bike Biz, Road.cc, and The London Cycling Campaign are crucial. Supporters for the project already includes The London Cyclist.
• Survey to find the best way to tag. It is important to have a good system to assess the quality of cycle routes - the criteria which constitute a good/bad route can probably be found by conducting a survey.  Each route/location tagged can then be rated against these criteria and a good/ok/bad grading.

Help Required - Apply within…

• User interface/user experience - as the app needs a mass uptake this needs to be done well.
• Survey - experience designing and conducting surveys.
• Openstreetmap - has anyone got experience incorporating openstreetmap in an iPhone app? Ian would like to pick your mind.

Cycling in London is crap.  The roads are congested, the air is polluted, the cycle lanes are a joke, it’s dangerous, and navigation of cycle routes impossible.  As a result only 7% of Londoners cycle every day compared to 55% of people in Copenhagen.  Londoners are scared to get on their bikes, and no amount of picturesque advertising is going to change that.

But cycling in London could be beautiful.  There are plenty of quiet residential roads, it’s flat, we have a temperate climate, and many already have a bike.

So why isn’t everyone cycling?

I’ll begin with a story. My ride to work is about 4 miles from Stockwell to Piccadilly via Vauxhall Bridge and Victoria.  My first few attempts were unpleasant gnarly affairs: I got caught in the gyratory at Vauxhall, stuck on a busy two lane stretch into Victoria, and Victoria itself is the third circle of hell with buses, lorries and congestion clogging every churning lane.  I’m a hardened cyclist and it was still too much.  Determined to improve the experience I studied OpenCycleMap and experimented with different routes (ie deliberately getting lost): since then I’ve found a far more pleasant route which cuts off soon after Vauxhall bridge taking a quieter speed bumped, cycle friendly route towards St James’s Park.

That first trip would have scared off a more casual rider, and fear is the main barrier to cycling in London.  Make the whole experience less daunting and you will soon see a cycling revolution.

Lets look at the ideal end vision for cycling in London and where the current approach is falling short. The three essential elements to encourage mass participation of London cycling are:

1. Routes which are safe and free of scariness (ie heavy traffic, major junctions, HGVs etc).
2. Convenient and fast routes into and around the capital.
3. A system of easy to navigate cycle routes.

The Mayor’s current strategy has had limited success on all three fronts.  Here are some broad brushstroke stye analysis of efforts in in these categories.

1. (and 2) Early indications are that the cycle superhighways are fairly ineffectual.  The routes are narrow and don’t protect an area of the road exclusively for cyclists making them little more than a blue streak at the edge of the road. I admire their intent and understand they aren’t completed, so perhaps they will be better than these early indications suggest.
2. (and 3) There are some cycle routes which stick to quieter routes (like the no. 3), leading to a pleasant ride. It has taken me two years to discover these routes and even with a GPS I struggle to keep to the track! Signage, mapping and promotion needs to significantly improve to make routes like this popular.

It seems clear that the strategy of the mayor isn’t doing enough to make cycling in London open to all. Only Lycra clad young males brave the streets when we should be seeing young and old, girls and boys, popping to the shops, visiting friends and going to work by bike.

Cyclists need to get organised to make cycling in London work

Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead

London cyclists are a passionate bunch. Cycling to and from work is almost a religion. Whenever I meet another London cyclist, a conversation about bikes, cycling routes and tall stories usually starts. By coordinating this group’s knowledge and dedication, many others can be encouraged to get on their bikes.

I would like to start a community project to trickle down the knowledge of the hardcore cyclists to the casual riders in an easy to use form.  This would at first be an iPhone app which hardcore users can use to rate cycle routes, highlight dangers, and use as a convenient cycle map of London. This would then be digested into an easy to use tool which everyone can use to plan the best cycle route in London. The end vision is to use the data to create the ultimate set of routes in London which can then be properly signposted and marked so that anyone can navigate London by bike using a simplified tube style map.

This data could also be used to help the planner make better decisions to improve the cycle network, much like fixmystreet has been doing for street repairs.  Aggregated data on the most popular routes and problems would help town planners make the best decisions when upgrading cycle facilities.

Later I’ll post some more thoughts on how this app would function and leverage Londons current cycling community to help everyone onto the road, but first I want to hear your thoughts. Which features would be key? How would you want to use it? Which other problems could this solve? Just add your comments below.