CyclOSM, a bicycle oriented render for every cyclist
2019-09-21 , Großer Hörsaal

CyclOSM is a new cycling render. It is free and aims at rendering new bicycle-specific features, in order to take into account the diversity of cycling practices.


CyclOSM is a new cycling render. It is free and aims at rendering more features than OpenCycleMap, in order to take into account the diversity of cycling practices.

For urban bikers (bike commuting), we decided to render all available types of cycle tracks and lanes, in a lateralized manner, as well as key POIs such as bicycle parkings, parkings shared with motorbikes, specific bike features (elevators / ramps), speed limitations, and surfaces of the highways to avoid paving stones.

For bicycle tourers, we also rendered bicycle touring routes as well as a set of essential POIs (emergency services, shelters, tourism, shops) as wel las elevation data to help you design your bike journey.

Building on the excellent quality of the OpenStreetMap data in Paris, we are also in touch with some local bicycle organizations to gather feedback and help them have a quick and detailed view of the current state of the cycling road infrastructure in the city. As such, a particular emphasis has been put on well rendering the quality of the infrastructures (clearly differentiating bidirectional cycle ways, dedicated lanes versus shared with public transport, etc) as well as some new elements which were not previously rendered: bike boxes and bumps.

Designing a map render for every cyclist is a challenging task: bike infrastructures are usually parcimonious and very tightly bound to the road network, which makes bike-first visualizations not as readable as wished. There are also a wide variety of cyclist profiles, each requiring slightly different emphasis. CyclOSM is our attempt at tackling this challenge. In this talk, we will briefly sum up the main rendered features as well as discuss the design decisions and the difficulties of bicycle-oriented rendering. This talk will also provide a basic "getting started" summary, to help you start contributing and hacking this new render.

A demo is already available at https://cyclosm.github.io/cyclosm-cartocss-style/example.html (limited to a few French cities at the moment, soon extended). The CyclOSM render is also available on the MapOSMatic instance https://maposmatic.osm-baustelle.de/. All contributions (issues, enhancements ideas or actual code through pull requests) are welcome at https://github.com/cyclosm/cyclosm-cartocss-style/ !


Talk keywords:

render,cartocss,bicycle,kosmtik,associations