3rd November 2023

The Spokesmen Cycling Podcast

EPISODE 342: Yorkshire Coast Gravel with Markus Stitz

SPONSOR: Tern Bicycles

HOST: Carlton Reid

GUEST: Markus Stitz

TOPICS: Two epic wet days riding in Yorkshire with gravel guru Markus Stitz

LINKS: Route YC. Bike & Boot hotel. LNER. Josh Reid’s YouTube channel.

MACHINE TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Welcome to episode 342 of the Spokesmen Cycling Podcast. This show was engineered on Friday 3rd of November, 2023.

The Spokesmen Cycling Roundtable Podcast is brought to you by Tern Bicycles. The good people at Tern are committed to building bikes that are useful enough to ride every day and dependable enough to carry the people you love. In other words, they make the kind of bikes that they want to ride. Tern has e bikes for every type of rider, whether you’re commuting, taking your kids to school, or even carrying another adult.

Visit www. ternbicycles. com [00:01:00] That’s T E R N bicycles. com to learn more. You may know Markus Stitz as Scotland’s very own German gravel guru, but I caught up with him in Yorkshire for two days of epic and rather wet riding. He’s been researching gravel and road rides for Route YC, a new brand for getting out and about on the Yorkshire coast.

I’m Carlton Reid, and I recorded audio with Markus as we rode on the cinder path between Scarborough and Whitby. This former railway line is one of the suggested rides that’ll go live on RouteYC. co. uk early next year. Also along for the ride was my endurance riding son. Josh, he’s not on the audio, that’s going to follow in a second, but he was filming beside us.

[00:02:00] So watch out for this video on his YouTube channel soon. In fact, there were three videographers on the trip, so we stopped lots. My video, short and sweet, is already on the hyphen spokesman dot com. Markus, I cannot see any whisky distilleries. I cannot see any young men in kilts. I cannot, we’re not, some puddles, but there are no lochks.

Um, what kind of part of Scotland have you brought me to here, Markus?

Um, Yorkshire.

This is a bit of a detour, literally, for you, isn’t it? Like, I mean, how come you’re in Yorkshire, Markus?

Yeah, it’s a, it’s a new, new territory for me. Um, I, I was approached by Tom Campbell, who [00:03:00] designed the North Coast 500 initially, and he was working on a project down here, and he was basically creating a number of routes down here for gravel bikes, road bikes, and touring bikes, and…

Due to the fact that I’ve done quite a bit of work of the same kind in Scotland and when I wrote Great British Travel Writer, I actually travelled a fair bit out of Scotland as well. Yeah, true. Um, yeah, it was, it was interesting to be commissioned. I think it’s, it’s been, it’s been interesting from a point of view that this has pretty much been a blank canvas for me, whereas in Scotland, most of the projects.

I had some sort of connection to the areas by either having lived there or travelled and, um, and this was, was slightly different about, but really enjoyable and it’s a beautiful part of the world. It’s [00:04:00] nice and what I loved about it is, it is very central. Yeah. It’s so much more accessible for. I better just describe what we’re going through because we are now going through quagmires, quite deep mud and it’s black mud.

Uh, and you could say it’s like cinders, because this is a cinder track. I’m just going to zip my top up here. Thank you. Thank you. So we’re going through black mud. Uh, we’re going underneath railway bridges. So clearly an old railway. Yes. Where have we come from and where are we going along this, the cinder track, Marcus?

So we’ve come from Scarborough. We joined the cinder track a little bit further on, so it starts in the town. But we went a little bit along the coast first and then joined it. And we’re heading to Whidbey on this. So, I [00:05:00] think it’s about 24 miles in total, this stretch. And, I mean, you were telling us before that it was going to be quite washed out.

Yeah. Is this as worse as it’s going to get worse than this? Um, this is possibly as, as soggy as it will get. It is. I’ve ridden this in, uh, in summer, and in summer it’s, it’s really enjoyable. Yeah, summer, it’s obviously, it’s dry. Now, they were talking about, uh, putting asphalt on the cinder track all the way, because then that would make a, you know, a Whitby to Scarborough.

But clearly they haven’t done that. I think there was a lot of protest to stop them doing that. So we did some stretches on asphalt, on tarmac, through town, but now we’re on the dirt. I mean, it’s quite okay here, but there are stretches where if you were on an everyday cycle, you wouldn’t want to go through that, and then even back further back there, [00:06:00] it was a lake.

That was, uh, something else. So this is, this is, I mean, the cinder track is like, it’s at the backbone of all your routes. Is it something that you think you’d use quite a lot to get from the variety of routes you’ve chosen? Yeah, it’s part of three routes. Um, I wouldn’t say it’s a back… Well, it’s kind of…

It’s possibly the longest continuous cycle track section along the coast. Um, but… The routes itself… It’s the road bikes that only take tarmac. If you go ahead there, Markus, I’ll catch you up. We can both carry on talking, don’t worry. Yeah, and… Thank you. Hello. Hey, uh, hi guys. Yeah, so there’s routes. Gravel bikes.

Road bikes and touring bikes. Alright, so we’re not just gravel bikes. I thought it was like, it’s only gravel. So this is, this is the whole commute then, that’s good. Yeah, so it’s, yeah. And there’s [00:07:00] also, so… The heart of the project is, uh… Went about 420 kilometres. I’ve forgotten how much that is in miles. I think 260 miles.

Um, so that’s a longer adventure route. But then there’s also a route which is shorter and suitable for riding on a weekend. Yeah. Uh, then a cycle touring route because further down south is Hull. What’s the route called? What’s the, what’s the, what are these routes? Route Yorkshire Coast. Yorkshire Coast, okay.

Um, but it does venture all of those roads, uh, routes. I think I have a nice mix of coastal riding, but also you go a little bit further inland because you’ve got the Yorkshire moors. Yep. And the vaults as well. And then, I particularly like the southern section actually, um, around Holderness. Because it’s, it’s quite flat, um, but quite interesting riding.

Like it’s not, it’s not flat riding where you get easily bored. [00:08:00] It’s um, yeah, really nice. Small villages and, um, sand dunes and, yeah, it’s just a really, I think that’s what I, what I do like about this region. It’s, there’s a huge variety of landscapes in a very, very small area if you travel through it. And how long have you been working on it, Mark?

I mean, you’ve done this, like, a lot of it in the winter. So it’s going to be a huge surprise to you in the summer, or have you been working on it so long that you’ve done the whole, you’ve done every season? So, I had initial discussions in April, and then I got commissioned in early June. Yeah. Early June.

And then ever since then, pretty much on and off, with a few other projects in between as well. Um, but, yeah, pretty much since the beginning of June. I’ve been doing this. And then we, we, we joined you last night. So I’m with, uh, we’re with Josh. So I’ve got [00:09:00] two intrepid world explorers here uh, helping me.

And actually very much helped me because I had a brake block, or a brake pad problem. And uh, the two world expeditionists just sorted me out. I didn’t have to do a thing, it was great. Uh, so I’m with Josh, my son, and with Marcus here, obviously. Riding along the cinder track, between Scarborough and Whitby.

And then we’re going to be going inland a bit. But when we met you last night, because we stayed, I mean I stayed there before with a dog. And it’s a fabulous hotel for dogs, for the same reasons it’s a fabulous hotel for cyclists actually. And that’s the Bike and Boot in Scarborough. And that was a brilliant hotel.

So just describe what it, if you’re a cyclist and you’re coming to Scarborough, What are you going to get from the bike and boot? I think, as a cyclist, it’s possibly the most important thing is you can lock your bike away securely, and you can wash it. [00:10:00] There’s a fantastic bike wash there, isn’t there?

Which is particularly good if you’ve just cycled along the coast and got your bike coated in salt water. Yeah. Um, so the bike facilities are pretty top notch. They are really nice. I, I just, I also think it’s really friendly staff and, and, and the rooms are lovely as well. I think it’s got a, it’s got a nice, I like quirky places.

I like places that have character. I mean, I’m equally happy to stay in my tent for the night. Yeah. Doesn’t have to be indoors all the time. But if I stay indoors, it’s just nice to have somewhere where you kind of feel like I’m welcomed here. Um, I’ve got a nice comfy place. I’ve got a coffee machine in the rooms as well, which I think is particularly helpful.

That, that always helps, definitely. I’m a bit of a night owl and early riser, so. Um, and actually, the thing we, we missed, because we came in late, they, they’ve got free cake at 4 o’clock as well. This is why it’s perfect for cyclists. Free cake, 4 o’clock. There you go. So far, I’ve mostly missed [00:11:00] that, because I was mainly out riding my bike at that time.

So you stayed there not just last night, you stayed there previously? Yeah, I stayed there quite a few times now, yeah. Yeah, it’s a cool hotel. Uh, now you’re, you’re not at the hotel, but you are with certain people. So tell me who you were filming with yesterday, that people will, will know from your videos.

Yeah, so Mark, Mark Beaumont, good friend of mine, and Jenny Graham. Um, we’ve… We’ve actually done quite a few projects together. We’ve done a film last year in Argyll in Scotland. And we bunched up again this year to do this. Yeah, it’s quite fun. I think it’s interesting because we are very similar in the way that we’ve, the three of us have ridden around the world.

Mark and Jenny hold world records, I don’t. Um, but I’m okay with that. I’ll cycle at a single speed so that possibly counts [00:12:00] as well. That’s a world record in itself. Come on. Going round on a single speed. Yeah. Um, so yeah, it’s been really nice just to kind of ride around. And the nice thing is, like, I guess we are, all the three of us, function really well independently.

But it’s also quite nice having the three of us together. And… It’s just, it’s the old crew really, isn’t it? It’s like, absolutely, it’s your classic. So you’ve, even though, and that’s the classic Scottish crew. Yeah. So even though people would think, oh well, you know, you’re going to be doing a route in Scotland.

You’ve actually come to Yorkshire. You’ve transplanted to, uh, uh, uh, to Yorkshire. Yeah. So describe those routes again then. What, what have, what have you got? What kind of, what’s the most challenging? And what’s the easiest? And then maybe we’ll get to the middle bit. Yeah, so the most challenging is, uh, I guess I would call it a four to five day [00:13:00] route.

Um, the adventure route. Um, we, we, possibly we give it a more distinctive name, but that’s what the working title is at the moment. Um. Which is a good point. So, would, this is not actually open yet as such? When is it launching? When is the actual… to the Yorkshire. Yeah. Roots will be launching in early 2024, so at the end, back end of January next year.

Um, just hopefully in time for people making plans to plan their holiday next year on a bike. Right, so I interrupted you there Markus, sorry, just to get, you know, exactly when this is opening. So you’re starting on the challenging, so four, five day challenging route. Yeah. Is that linking every single route up, or is that like a big circle?

What is that? It’s kind of, in a way, it is a circular route that’s, which kind of encloses all the other routes which are in there. Um, but it’s a route, a route by itself and that one is, I guess it’s designed for people who either want to get into bikepacking [00:14:00] and don’t mind having a longer route, but something which is a bit less challenging to start off with so you can ease in over the first two days.

And then once you hit the North York moors, things get a bit more remote and a bit steeper. So it starts in Scarborough, heads down the coast, beautiful coastline. Basically what we’re doing now? Is that the first part of it? That will be the last part actually, so we’re going in reverse at the moment.

Right. The last section will be coming down from Bridge Beach, Scarborough, on the cinder track. Um, but yeah, you start off on the coast, go all the way down to Spurn Point, which is a super interesting place. Um, it’s a sand pit sticking out into the Humber and then back through the inland actually. So once you’ve done the coast pit, um, you go a little bit further inland, um, and then into the

moors. So through the walls first and then into the moors and then [00:15:00] north of the River Esk to Whitby and then back down to Scarborough. Yeah. And sand pit. Yeah, there’s quite a bit of climbing in that as well. But, it’s, I guess I design routes this, I think that’s, and this is, this is, this is, I guess the result of, of having done this a number of times now.

I guess I look at surface, I look at gradients, I look at how this works together so, you know, you don’t really want to batter people continuously with one steep hill after another one. Um, a nice mix of it is welcome. Um, but it’s also looking at facilities for cyclists along the way. So, um, is there, is there accommodation?

Are there places for people to get some food? I think it’s super important to kind of look at public transport as well. So actually before I did any of the routes here, [00:16:00] I had a look at how people can get here by train. And then kind of… Because it’s really good to understand what the main routes are and how people can get here and then kind of looking at starting points.

So the reason why Scarborough, for example, is the starting point. It’s just the most accessible place if you take the train. Yes, so back in the bike and boot in the, I don’t know about your room, Marcus, but say in my room there was a poster there 1930s poster for LNER, in fact. Yeah. When, you know, they were doing holiday trips to, to Scarborough.

So it is accessible by train, very accessible. We certainly got here by, by train. So we took the LNER from Newcastle, got to York. I mean, it was challenging weather yesterday. So, you know, a lot of Scotland has been inaccessible to train just recently. And parts of Yorkshire were [00:17:00] inaccessible to train yesterday.

But we did get here, about an hour. An hour late once we got the, the train from York to, to Scarborough. Got to the bike and boot and just about made it before, uh, the chef went home for the night. So we had a couple of burgers while we got in. Now, this is a beautiful route, so we’re, we’re expecting tons of rain the next day.

But right now, we’re, we’re kind of wet underfoot, but… We’re dry, we’re dry. So we’ve got squirrels going between our wheels almost. We’ve got this amazing churned up black mud. Which is where the cinder name comes from. Um, but it is beautiful. Now what we’ve got coming up so we’re gonna, in a minute we’re gonna have we’re gonna have views in about Half an hour probably to, to Robin Hood’s Bay.

What, what, what route, what can you [00:18:00] see from the cinder track? So this, this first section is, yeah, quite enclosed in the woodland. It’s beautiful. And then once we come to Ravenscar, Um, which has a lot of interesting history behind it, because it used to be, well, supposed to be a big town, but it never went, took off.

Um, so from Ravenscar onward, you’ll get some amazing views right over the bay. over to Robin Hoods Bay. And then from Robin Hoods Bay, we would have a climb up again and then views towards Whitby and the Abbey. Ooh! Ooh! Yeah, Mark has had a bit of a slip there. I’m doing my cyclocross exercise here. Yeah. Um, I mean the track is definitely quite cut up, isn’t it?

Yeah, and then yeah, I just think Whitby is such a beautiful setting, the town. And there’s also For anyone who is super brave, possibly we shouldn’t, shouldn’t encourage people to do that. But there’s a, there’s a road called [00:19:00] Church Lane, which is a extremely steep cobbled road. Um, so there’s a… Coming down from the…

Coming down from the Abbey. The Abbey in Wembley, yeah. Past the graveyard that inspired Dracula. Yeah. Bram, Bram Stoker. Bram Stoker. Yeah. Um, yeah. We tried to ride that yesterday. I think we were all brave enough for the first bit and then did, um, kind of good production over braveness, braveness and push the bike for the last bit.

Yeah. I, I have heard that someone actually circled up there on the flat bike, so it must be doable, but I think you need five inch tires for good, for a good traction. But yeah, it’s a, this is just a really nice mix of. route and some villages and some, some really nice coastal scenery, uh, big cliffs [00:20:00] coming up soon.

Yeah. So I’ve cycled here tonnes. I’ve cycled on the cinder track tonnes and it’s a, it’s a, it’s a great route. Certainly it links into lots of the walled routes that I’m guessing you’re using quite a lot. Yeah. But right now. Yeah. Yeah. We’re going to cut to a break and we’re going to go across to my colleague David as I struggle through these big, big gaps.

Take it away, David.

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And we’re back with Marcus and with Josh somewhere behind. I’m on the cindy track still. And Marcus, before the break, you were telling us, uh, about the, the long route, the challenging route. Yeah. So, first of all, tell us what we’re doing today.

Where are we ending up? So, we’re getting to Whitby. We thought we were getting to Whitby for breakfast, but we’re not. We’re going to get breakfast, or have breakfast at a hotel, but we’re going to get to Whitby. Where are we going from Whitby? Um, there’s, I guess, kind of depends on what time of the day we get there, but roughly, we [00:22:00] head west from there.

So, we either go… Above the Asquarelle to the north, or to the Asquarelle, uh, towards Crosmont. And then to Gauffland, and I’ll be staying in Gauffland. Which is a, it’s like a proper Yorkshire Moors village, with sheep grazing the streets. Yes. I remember the first time I came there, I was just like, this is um…

This is very interesting. And it’s got, I think I, I, I get a, Um, I, I like steam railways. Yeah, I was going to say there’s a railway through there, isn’t there? Yeah. So you can actually take a railway. Can you take your bikes on that railway? Yes, I think you can. Um, they have bike spaces. Um, I haven’t, I haven’t managed to get it yet.

Just done several times of filming steam trains along the way.

I’ll [00:23:00] hold your bike.

This way. There you go. And we’re going through a nice station here. Yeah, I think that used to be a old platform. Yeah. Nice brick and a concrete topping. You can tell this was a railway and a beautiful little cottage here. That was the railway station. Yeah, it would be nice to take the train here. I think it must be an absolutely amazing journey.

Yeah. So there’s somebody just living there. That’s not B& B, it’s not a restaurant, not a cafe. That’s just somebody living there in the station. That’s cool. Yeah. Right, so we’re ending up in Gowtham. And then, if we’ve got some daylight, I’ve asked you if we can crack on and maybe go to Wealdale. Is Wealdale on one of your routes?

We’re not going off route there? It is, um… Yeah, the actual Roman road itself isn’t on it, but the road basically next [00:24:00] to it is on it, yeah. Yeah, so Weald, so that, that, well, it’s still part of your route if we go through Wealdale. Have a, a look at the, the arch… Yeah. Just to, to, to explain, I came to Gowthland and to Wealdale, in fact, Wealdale Lodge, when it was still a youth hostel, and this is 25 years ago, when I was a college student, so I did my geography coursework.

in this part of the world, so I know it well. And I know how gorgeous it is. Uh, no motorcycles on this path, says that sign. Josh is coming through, so we’ll leave the gate open. So we’re gonna go and hopefully go and see the Roman road. And then we are staying in Gotland. Yes. And then, so that’s where we’re going.

So how about, uh, How about telling us about maybe the simplest routes, the, the easiest routes you can do. Are these family friendly routes? Yes. Um, there’s, so there’s one, I, [00:25:00] just out of the top of my head, the shortest route is a, is a crabber route around Friley. So it starts in Friley and then kind of meanders through the Lettish farmland um, on the back of Friley, and then you come back to Friley.

That’s about it. I think less than 10 miles in total. Um, Um, so that’s certainly. Then there’s another one up in Whitby which is a bit more hilly, but takes you on the cinder track for a short section, and then through the Asprelli and back. I guess the cinder track if it’s, if it’s in summer. section, so I particularly recommend going from Whidbey to Robin Hoods Bay and back.

That would be a nice family friendly route because it’s flat ish. Um, and there’s some nice places to get some food in Robin Hoods Bay on Whidbey. Yeah. Um, [00:26:00] and, and the other, I think the other really interesting, which is not like a route in itself, but, um, If, one thing which feels like an adventure but you don’t really go far is to head out to Spurn Point in the south.

Um, it’s a bit pushing your bike over, over the beach for a wee while, but once you get on that tarmac road which is still there, down to the lighthouse, it’s just such a really nice place with loads of birds. So, if you’re into having a bit of wildlife on your cycling trip. That’s the place to go. Thanks to Marcus Stitz there, and thanks to you for listening to episode 342 of the Spokesman podcast, brought to you in association with Turn Bicycles.

Show notes and more can be found at the spokesman. com. The next episode will be the fourth dedicated to cycle navigation apps, as I [00:27:00] talk to Komoot. That show will be out later in the month. But meanwhile, get out there and ride.[00:28:00]

20th October 2023

The Spokesmen Cycling Podcast

EPISODE 340: In conversation with Zack Hamm of Ride with GPS

SPONSOR: Tern Bicycles

HOST: Carlton Reid

GUEST: Zack Ham

TOPICS: I’ve featured folks from Bike Map and Cycle.Travel and now in this third episode about cycle navigation apps I talk with Zak Ham, co-founder of Ride with GPS

MACHINE TRANSCRIPT:

Carlton Reid 0:12
Welcome to Episode 340 of the spokesmen cycling podcast. This show was engineered on Friday 20th of October 2023.

David Bernstein 0:29
The Spokesmen cycling roundtable podcast is brought to you by Tern bicycles. The good people at Tern are committed to building bikes that are useful enough to ride every day and dependable enough to carry the people you love. In other words, they make the kind of bikes that they want to ride. Tern has e-bikes for every type of rider. Whether you’re commuting, taking your kids to school or even carrying another adult, visit www.ternbicycles.com. That’s t e r n bicycles.com to learn more.

Carlton Reid 1:04
I’ve featured folks from bikemap and cycle.travel. And now in this third episode about cycle navigation apps, I talk with Zack Ham, co founder of Ride with GPS. I’m Carlton Reid, and I recorded this chat remotely. Zack did have a great mic, but he didn’t have a pop filter. So there are a few slight plosives in the first half of the show. But we did cure that in the second half. Now tell me that you live in Eugene, but then go to work in Portland. Is that kind of right?

Zack Ham 1:43
Oh, no, that would be that’s they’re about 100 miles apart. I lived in Eugene for about nine years. That’s where I met my wife. And that’s where we started the company. But I moved to Portland, about 10 years ago. So I’m in Portland now.

Carlton Reid 1:56
So I noticed there was there was there was definitely two centres. You know, the original route was in Eugene. But clearly you’ve kind of said My question was going to be really is the fact that it’s now in Portland or even then in Portland? Is that the reason there is a bicycle app? Because Portland clearly is is in certainly in North American terms. chocker with bicycles.

Zack Ham 2:24
You know, it’s it’s funny, that’s a question that we get all the time for, like, oh, Portland must be a great, great place to have an app for recycling because there’s so many cyclists there. But the truth is, my partner and I both grew up in the Portland area. It’s just kind of coincidental. And most, you know, we have a great audience of people that use our stuff and in the Portland area, but it’s not it’s like maybe in the top six cities in the US for us. So it’s really not central to the business.

Carlton Reid 2:52
Interesting. And your bit your partner that is Cullen Cullen

Zack Ham 2:55
King. Yes, exactly. And he he went to college in Corvallis, which is about 30 miles north of Eugene. So we actually started we started riding motorcycles together in high school. And so the very, very early days of, of the product, we were just programmers, we like to working on software projects. That was really the impetus. And we did our first testing on motorcycles and we still have a contingent of, you know, dual sport and adventure riders who swear by our product, you know, 15 years later, and some of them have no idea that it’s that it’s really focused on cycling.

Carlton Reid 3:31
Because I’m a motorcyclist cyclist, you can have very similar routing needs.

Zack Ham 3:37
Sure, it’s not about going from A to B, oftentimes, you end where you start, you’re just trying to go out on you know, scenic, beautiful roads where there’s not a lot of traffic. On the motorcycle, you don’t really care if you’re going up or down hills, but you like you like a curvy road. And the only reason to make a curvy road is typically because you’re going up or down hills. So it ends up being very similar from the routing front.

Carlton Reid 4:00
Hmm. So 2007 was when you and these two motorcyclists fresh out, were you fresh out of college? Are you still doing it in college?

Zack Ham 4:10
Oh, no, I was a I was a sophomore in college at the time. And actually, we we started it in two late 2006. So yeah, quite quite a while back.

Carlton Reid 4:18
So that’s the same age as this podcast.

Zack Ham 4:20
So you know how you know it feels?

Carlton Reid 4:24
Yes, that’s how long your product has been out there because this this podcast is a dinosaur in podcast terms. So 2006 2007 ish, when it comes out. So why are you doing what what’s the what’s the landscape here? Literally the kind of digital landscape and what why are you creating this? Why is there nothing like this out there?

Zack Ham 4:46
You know, 2006 and seven was just a different time on the internet. And perhaps I was just a different age. So I was, you know, young and naive and had that kind of ignorant confidence that you have then which is See, which is really a powerful tool because I had a boss who was a coach of a women’s cycling team and Eugene and he had been trying to get me into cycling and telling me how cool it is, I should stop riding my motorcycle and just, you know, get some exercise. And I finally took him up on the offer one day went out on a pretty tough 30 mile ride, which for me was was crazy. And, you know, I came back and I’m like, wow, that was incredible. But the thing that really stuck with me was he took this GPS unit, he had a Garmin 705 At the time, took it off his bike, plugged it into his computer, and showed me the data that he had. And it was like, there was a line on a map show he had a barometric altimeter, he had a power metre at the time, which was pretty advanced, you know, speed and cadence sensor, heart rate strap, he had all the technology at the time. And I saw the software and I’m like, this software could be so much better, and what other sport in the world other than like Formula One racing collects this much data, like cyclists are a strange breed. And so as a programmer who was contemplating getting into riding, I was like, I have to do this because as a programmer, it’s interesting, I didn’t even care about bikes. At first, I just was really interested in all the data people were collecting. So that was really the spark. And then looking at the competitive landscape. I mean, at the time there was map, my fitness, there’s Map My ride, and then there was also a company called motion based that eventually got acquired by Garmin and turned into Garmin Connect. And looking at those, you know, being that confident sophomore in college, I just shrugged my shoulders and was like, I could build something better. Like, you know, it was that was how the Internet was back then there was just less money and everything things were less developed. And, you know, a high school or a college student could really look at the landscape and say, I could do that.

Carlton Reid 6:45
Now I’ve seen the side to research this kind of I went on on bikeportland. So that’s where I got the articles, original one from way back when Jonathan Maus has done a review, and then the later one where he’s talking about, you know, you’ve been going for 15 years. So I’ve got some other kind of biographical details. Sure. And that’s how I knew about cologne on there, all that kind of stuff. So on on on bikeportland. It was basically talking about where you’ve come from. And that was where my question was coming from. Also, by the way for for, for cycling. Could you if you’re in Portland, that’s why and I would definitely like to circle back on give us your your top cities. But on that on a coverage that Jonathan did have you, I think it’s you are saying you basically you bootstrapped this. And you always bootstrapped it all the way through in that you’re self funded. And tell me how many members of staff you have now?

Zack Ham 7:47
Yeah, we’re just about 35 people at the moment. So that’s

Carlton Reid 7:50
a lot of people to be relying on your subscriptions.

Zack Ham 7:55
Yeah. And we’re hiring right now. So yeah, we’ve been, you know, we started the company just, I don’t know that. I don’t know, maybe, maybe, Colin and I put in a couple 100 bucks or something for hosting. I don’t even remember at this point. But, uh, yeah, we started in 2009. We asked people if, you know, hey, you know, back then you’d see this more often. But we’re like, Oh, if you like what we’re doing, you’re welcome to donate to our PayPal, you know, buy us a cup of coffee, whatever. And, you know, very quickly, we’re getting about 1000 US dollars a month. And it just kind of struck us, okay, this, this is starting to look like a business. And before that it was just a hobby, you know, we worked on it together quite often. And, and then in 2011, I was able to go full time on it. And from then it was just this sort of cycle of, oh, okay, we made some more money. Should we hire somebody? Should we, you know, buy another server, and just kind of rinse and repeat. And then, you know, coming into where we’re at today, you know, we’re still customer funded, still profitable. And, yeah, we have about 35 people and hopefully bring on a handful more towards the end of this year and into next year. And I think right now, it’s kind of the most exciting time in the business yet we’re, we have a really, really strong team. You know, everybody’s into bikes, everybody’s passionate about the space, people have chosen us as an employer. For very personal reasons. It’s not just the job. And everybody kind of buys into our mission, that we’re focused on bikes, that we want people to get on a better ride, and just kind of staying really, really close to this niche that we’re in. And instead of trying to go broad and you know, be everything for everyone.

Carlton Reid 9:39
So when you when you got those first 1000 bucks with via PayPal, at that point, you must have thought, well, we need two levels here. We need a level that anybody can can use and then we need the subscription level. And is that when you start adding crazy features, or is it always Oh, wait, you need to add this feature? And then it’s like, no, hang on, we’ve got to stop, we’ve got to stop this is going to pay our wages here.

Zack Ham 10:07
Yeah, it’s, you know, it actually took us a while to launch the paid account, because we just had made everything free up to that point. And, you know, for us, it was really, we were never really focused on the business, or the sales, or the conversion funnel, or all the kinds of traditional software as a service, stuff that, that you should be worried about, frankly, for us, we just had all these people using our site, and then they would email us and be like, Hey, I have a Garmin 605, and I got this error. And that would be kind of our dopamine hit, we’d be like, yes, we’re going to solve this problem for this person. And then they’d come back and say, I want an awesome bike ride. Thanks. And that was really what drove us and still drives us today. And then in terms of the money side, you know, we we identified some features that we’re speculative, these kind of this advanced analysis studio feature, and a few other a few other convenience things. And we’re like, Yeah, let’s, let’s launch a paid account. And we’ll we’ll have like, you know, syncing with the there’s a wait an app plus weight scale, and it’s like, this is obscure enough, we’ll make this paid. And since then, we’ve gotten a little bit more refined. But we still like to have a product that’s really useful if you don’t pay us. Because ultimately, the people, whether you pay us or not, you’re you’re part of our community, you’re contributing back. You know, if you go on a ride, then you could submit a review of the route that you did that’s going to help somebody else. Or you can seek your rides and help build out our global heat map and help people understand what roads are safe and popular to ride on. So it’s not just about collecting money from people, there’s also opportunity for you to contribute value back just by participating.

Carlton Reid 11:49
So tell me, you’ve kind of like touched on a few bits of paid for too. But tell me what what do you if that if I go on via the app, or I’m presuming on online as well, on the on the on the browser based version as well? What do I get as a as a fully paid up member? And how much? And Are there levels?

Zack Ham 12:10
Yes. So there’s, there’s two levels that would apply to you as a consumer. And then we also have, we have a programme for organisations like bike clubs, event operators, tour operators, that’s, that’s a separate side of the business. But on the consumer side, we have two levels. And we’ve tried to simplify this. But basically, if all you need or want are the features of the mobile app, which for us is our mobile route planner, mobile navigation, offline maps, live tracking, and then a few other a few other bits. But those are the main ones. It’s really all about offline maps and navigation. That’s what people that really seems to drive purchases on the mobile app, then that 60 US dollars a year, you know, kind of in the middle and comparable to some of the other competitors. And then if you also want to unlock the website, which is advanced route planning, some advanced analysis tools, but ultimately, it’s really about that, that route planner on the web, then it’s $80 a year. And that gives you the mobile app and the web. So so it’s for people who just care about the mobile app, 60 bucks for people that want everything and really want to open up their computer and it kind of use the Photoshop of Route planners as we like to think of it, then it’s that $80 level and we call that premium.

Carlton Reid 13:33
Okay, now, that way, I I’m gonna open up my phone to see where the app is on on my phone. And you can hear my my dog in the background, there probably is a ride that I did in in Sardinia 2002. In fact, it’s only just come out in the Daily Mail that I put out, I think I sent you the link so I put ride with GPS as a mention in that piece. That came out yesterday. But that was basically a tour company in this case, Turismo of Italy had paid for a group subscription, and then all the members of that, of that that particular bike tour, could then be fed information, be fed all the routes and have everything on their smartphone, for that particular bike tour. So that’s how I’ve got it on my my phone already. Is from that that tour? So how much does it cost? A bike tour company, a club on organisation, what are they paying? What are they getting?

Zack Ham 14:42
You know, so that’s, that’s a part of the business that’s that I’ve always been really proud of and happy with. When we launched our what we call our organisations programme. Originally it was just the Club account back in 2015. We were trying to find we didn’t want to charge nothing for it because we knew that If we charged nothing, then the incentives wouldn’t be aligned, we wouldn’t want to provide as much support or we wouldn’t be able to justify it. But we also didn’t want to charge very much, because we wanted it to be utilised as much as possible. Because the ultimate goal, this is what we do, instead of marketing, instead of spending money on banner ads, or what have you, or paying for Google AdWords, we take the money that we might spend there, and we invest it into this organisations programme, so that somebody like you ends up with our app on on their phone, and, you know, some percentage of you afterwards would be like, Oh, that was kind of cool, that navigation worked well. And hopefully, we can let you understand you can also use this in your personal life. So it’s this sort of like marketing channel. But really, it’s this partnership with organisations, so they pay us the base price is $250 a year, which, again, for the value that they get is pretty inexpensive. And so as a result, you know, we have nearly 2000 organisations in that programme, you know, 1000 of which are bike clubs. And, you know, we just have tools that nobody else wants to build. It’s a, it’s frankly, kind of an an unsexy area on the software front, especially if you’re a consumer focused company. Because, you know, what’s the bike club need, like we have, we have bike clubs that have 5000 routes, and, you know, you need, you basically need to build like a spreadsheet tool for them to manage this bulk operations, tags, all this kind of boring b2b stuff that I think a consumer focused company really doesn’t want to build. And so we’ve kind of tackled those problems. And as a result, if you go on tour with a company like turismo, then they’re gonna say, hey, please instal this driver GPS app. And you’ll have this really slick experience where you can scan a QR code, you get into this branded portal for them, all you see are the routes you’re going to do on your tour, you get to use navigation. And then in the end, we say, Hey, you can also use this app in your personal life.

Carlton Reid 16:56
Yeah. So that’s why I’ve got it on there now is I’m going to, we’re going to cut for a break. But before we do that, I do want to come back to you. And actually, I want to put your microphone out because there’s a few pops. So hopefully in the ad break, we can actually sort that out so there’s not so many pops afterwards. So we’ll be right back.

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Carlton Reid 18:14
Thanks, David and we are back with with Zack Zack ham of ride with GPS and we had a wee chat there. And we’ve hopefully got Peters pickled peppers won’t be such a problem going forward. I didn’t want to stop Zach initially, because it wasn’t all the time. And it was just you know, the little thing and most of the audio was absolutely fantastic. But it’s just the audio pops. Anyway, I think we’ve sorted that. So Zack, when I go back, I when you came in, when we started the recording, you were telling me that Portland and this was surprising. This is very surprising. But maybe this is indicative of something so so let’s let’s dig into that. Portland was not your city, was it your sixth highest? It’s not your it’s not the biggest or not even the second or third biggest use where your heat map is in bringing up routes routes in the US. So a How come? Is that a surprise? Or is that like indicative because when you read Jonathan Maus’ articles, you realise that, you know Portland, Oregon was fantastic maybe 1015 years ago, and has since gone downhill in many respects since then. So is it indicative of that? Or would you think it’d always have been at that level?

Zack Ham 19:37
No, that’s kind of how it’s been the whole time. And, you know, it’s not it’s not really an indictment of Portland as a great place for cycling because on a percentage basis, it’s it’s a very high performing city for us. So in terms of how you know of our registered users, how many of them are active and engaged how many of them have found enough value to pay us Portland perform EMS very, very well. But just as a population centre, it’s simply not as big, as you know, Seattle, Boston, the New York area, the LA area. So it’s really that perspective of, you know, if we’re going to be thinking of regional centres to, to be kind of focused on have on our radar to be engaging with sort of the influential clubs and organisations in those areas, then, you know, Portland, yes, it’s important, it’s on the list. It’s where we live as well, which makes it especially kind of near and dear to our hearts. But, you know, it’s not one of the biggest cities in the country. It’s really a mid sized city. And we have many of those in the US. And in terms of you know, how it’s changed over time. It’s obviously been in Portland, we, because of all the news, especially since, you know, since since COVID, since 2020, the reputation of Portland has really gone downhill. You know, I don’t know if you ever were exposed over there to the show Portlandia. But that kind of input? Oh, yeah, I kind of put Portland on the map as being this quirky, weird, fun, safe place. And, and the reality is, has always been a little bit different from that. And so, you know, people that live here, I think, are now a little bit on the defensive, because, you know, they go to Thanksgiving dinner, to the east coast to go back with their family. And all they have to do is kind of fend off this barrage of, you know, I hear Portland’s on fire, it’s terrible. And it’s like, yeah, Portland has a lot of problems in there. And they’re very serious. A lot of the West Coast cities do. But at its core, you know, I can still ride my bike to work, we still have our bike infrastructure. And for the most part, it’s, it’s a wonderful time over here. It’s just, yeah, it could it seen better days. And I hope that, you know, the city gets its act together and sorts sorts things out in a humane and fair manner. But Portland still a great place,

Carlton Reid 21:53
basically, that it’s the demographics size, rather than the number of hardcore cyclists. So you just got to get more people in a bigger place. Be sure that’s, that’s where your top cities then?

Zack Ham 22:07
Yeah, so I mean, Portland punches above its weight class, I think it’s another minute to think of okay, but yeah, for us, you know, Seattle, Boston, you know, the LA area, the New York area, those are all those are all really big, it’s kind of even the Chicago area, although, as we head into winter, that’ll that’ll go down quite a bit. So it’s kind of the obvious places just by population, as long as people ride bikes there, then in the US, we’re really well known, we’re really strong, we have a presence. In most places, we’re kind of the default, like the expected app to be used by event organisers or by bike clubs. And consequently, we’ve kind of gotten our way into the cycling community throughout the US. And then, you know, when you go outside of the US, you have different experiences, right? In some some countries, or some areas, were really not that popular. And then in some areas, there’s these pockets where everybody’s using us. So that’s kind of the the emerging story for for our opportunity, when

Carlton Reid 23:11
you pay that 60 bucks, or 80 bucks, if you want, like the getting behind the scenes on the on the browser based version. And you’re getting all the bells and whistles, you’ve got to be pretty hardcore. To be going into that, that kind of depth. So can you see which of your users are writing so much, or updating, you know, their app so much? And you classify them as hardcore? Probably athletes? Maybe if they’re writing that much? And how many are more recreational say they’ll just do something like at the weekend? And do you classify? Do do you have a? I mean, I’m asking you a question here that maybe you wouldn’t want to answer just how much of the data you do dig into. But if it’s if it’s if it’s anonymized data, then it’s it surely isn’t a problem? are you digging into the data to find out who your users is? What is my question? I guess.

Zack Ham 24:10
Yes. And, and no, like, honestly, the question that you just asked, I think a lot of this information would be incredibly valuable to us to tell you what routes you might want to ride. So for us on a product basis, being able to give you your next great bike ride, or at the very least make sure that your next ride is better, and you ride a little more often. That’s really our job. And we would be able to do that much better, the more that we know about your riding. So I certainly have no qualms about thinking in terms of like wanting to know more about you as a cyclist, because I think that’s in your best interest. But in terms of you know, what data we’re collecting and how we’re sort of partitioning our users. It’s really not as sophisticated as it It would be, frankly, because the, for the most part, for the most of the company’s history, we’ve really been focused on talking to our users, we have like a really, really well known and renowned customer support team. We’ve invested in that side of the business, especially since we worked with all these organisations, we’re on the phone a lot. We answer many, many, many support tickets very, very quickly, and very knowledgeably. And so we bring all of that qualitative information to bear when we’re developing the product. And then, of course, we watch usage of the product, you know, in a broad fashion to say, okay, you know, how much are these features being used versus other features, just to calibrate our intuition. But, you know, really to answer your question, I wish we knew a lot more than we do. And we’re going to kind of move in a direction where it’s not just serving our interests, so that we can be behind the scenes and tinkering and kind of managing all of your data, it’s really going to be more of this cooperative and upfront thing, where we’re asking you what type of riding Do you want to do, because it’s not just about your behaviour that we’re observing, it’s also about your aspiration, because maybe you really want to get into gravel riding. But you haven’t done it before, because you didn’t have anybody to do it with and you don’t know what a safe and reasonable route is. And so we should probably be giving you recommendations about your aspirations and not just your past.

Carlton Reid 26:20
And you do have a turn by turn, turn by turn is in the paid version. Yeah. Is in the subscriber level?

Zack Ham 26:29
Yes, correct. Yeah, you get voice voice turn by turn navigation. And it’s funny this started out because we got so frustrated with Garmin units. And we and we love Garmin, we love we love their units. Same with Wahoo, they make incredible head unit. So I have nothing bad to say about any of them. But at least a long time ago, with a Garmin unit, you would set a route out and it would be a loop. And maybe it was like a lollipop. So the the first section you would come back on. And frequently, it would just shortcut the whole thing. And then it would say route complete. And you’d have to go and restart navigation, we thought that was so silly. It’s like my goal isn’t to get to the finish line, it’s to do the whole route. And that really was one of the things that inspired our navigation. So, you know, for us, we make sure if you go and say I wanted to go and do for loops of this section of the route, we make sure you do four loops of it. But if you do three loops, and you cut off early, then we recognise that and we’ll move you forward on the route. But it’s it’s a very specific and nuanced take on navigation, where we recognise that people actually want to do the route that they planned, even if there are shorter and more efficient ways to get to the finish line.

Carlton Reid 27:44
And then that’s an athlete user.

Zack Ham 27:48
We don’t Yeah, we don’t think in terms of I guess I didn’t come my partner and I didn’t come from the competitive cycling world. And so for us, I don’t know, we don’t think of ourselves as athletes. And yeah, there’s certainly members of the team and members of our audience that do consider themselves athletes. So I’m not disparaging that, but no, I mean, I can go out and ride 100 miles, but I don’t think of myself as an athlete. For me, I just, I think bikes are something special, you know, you can combine really cool endurance, exercise performance, all that stuff with a really great social setting, enjoy nature, have a little adventure, get a little adrenaline rush on the downhill. And like that whole experience is really what we’re focused on. So the people that use our product, kind of our best, our favourite user, the person who is really, really digging into all the details, and the nooks and crannies and using it every day are really more on the adventurous side where they appreciate novelty, you know, they don’t want to just go a lot of athletes might go and do the same loop every weekend or, you know, the same training ride. And frankly, for them, maybe maybe training peaks or Strava is a better a better use of of their of their time or their money because if they’d already know exactly where they’re going, we don’t necessarily have a lot of differentiating things to offer them. But for us, if you want to go in a new ride, a more interesting ride, you want to mix it up, you want to travel somewhere and go on to the best possible ride with the time you have. That’s really our sweet spot.

Carlton Reid 29:16
So if I land in Paris, for instance, I get up one of the train stations, and I’ve got to get across town. And I don’t know my way about am I going to be using a rider’s GPS Am I gonna be firing up your app on my phone?

Zack Ham 29:32
Yeah, absolutely. And I And I’ve done exactly that. Yeah, that’s a that’s a great use of it. I use it every time I travel and and when I’m travelling with my wife, my goal is not to you know she’ll my own product to my significant other like that’s not my objective. My objective is to make sure that she still likes bikes afterwards. And I always do rely on our product and then I come back and I report a bug or two and, and frankly I rave to the team about like how awesome it was that I was able to go there and ride like a lot Local, with very minimal effort, go on this wonderful bike ride that I just couldn’t have done without a piece of software like ours.

Carlton Reid 30:07
So rod like a local. So that’s good. So you basically this the heat map shows you that, or the curators ride shows you that just this is where a local would ride, they probably wouldn’t go this route, even though that looks like a sensible route on a map. So you bring up on a map and you think well, that’s that’s probably the way to go. And then you kind of refer to yours like, well, actually, most people are going that route. Is that Is that how you describe it, that’s how people are using it.

Zack Ham 30:35
That’s, that’s one piece of it. And the heat map, I feel that the heat map is, is a tool you can use to kind of get a baseline, you know, hey, I’m not writing, I’m not writing like I don’t know anything. But you know, the most popular roads aren’t necessarily the way to go all the time, because you might have a commuting corridor, where it’s a fine place to ride. But perhaps if you’re doing a recreational ride, you really don’t want to be on there, you want to be on this less popular section that goes out of town and does this nice big loop. Maybe it’s more scenic, maybe there’s a hill and the commuting one doesn’t have a hill, there’s a lot of reasons why you don’t just want to follow the most heat on a heat map. And for us, you know, we don’t think that, you know, we can be like the smart people behind the scenes with the algorithms in the software, and just come into your community and say these are the best rides like we’ve never believed that we know more than people on the ground, especially working with the most knowledgeable route planners in an area all these people that run bike clubs or run bike tours. So for us, we want to build software to support those people and build build these advocates that have the authority locally. So that they can go out and say, Hey, these are the best routes, this is the best way to string these things together. So instead of here’s just another map, you know, sure it’s a heat map, but it’s just another map, choose your own adventure, you can come and use our tools to look at a map and say, Oh, here’s, if I pick any of these five routes, like I’m good, this is going to be a great time on a bike, it’ll be a varied experience, you know, I’m going to start at a coffee shop and see a nice local cycling friendly business, get out of town, have a nice viewpoint have a nice challenging climb, or whatever. And you can select your filters on do I want, you know, all paved or some unpaved do I want a lot of climbing do I want to be short or long. And our goal is to just give you instead of 10,000 routes in a heat map of a million options, we want to give you just a few options. So that you have a little bit of variation, but ultimately, like just like a friend would do. So they say Hey, this is the route you want to do. You know, I’m not gonna give you 25 ideas. I’m just gonna tell you go do this one.

Carlton Reid 32:54
Here and then and you’re maybe it’s very different in America. I mean, it’s only in the UK when we begin to audit seven maps. But they were never kept as actually as up to date as the map I’m going to mention which is Open Street Map, which which powered literally powered loads and loads of navigation businesses was open street map that important to you to begin with. I mean, how important was it? I’m right in thinking it’s always been generally more important in Europe than in North America. It’s certainly been more more updated in Europe than in in North America like in Germany, you down to you know, streetlamps, you know, individual street lamps are on OpenStreetMap. Just crazy amounts of detail from from techy people just volunteering. So how important back in the day was OpenStreetMap to you? And how important is it to you now?

Zack Ham 33:49
Yeah, originally OpenStreetMap just wasn’t, like you said it just wasn’t there in in the US. We were, you know, on the sidelines, cheering it on. And we’re really excited about it. We love. We love those kinds of open source style projects. And yeah, we’re, we’re big fans of OpenStreetMap since the very, very early days, even though it didn’t make for the best product for us. And so we’ve always believed in just using the best tool for the job at the time and being open to changing that. So when we first had the route planner out, JavaScript was too slow and web browser. So it was flash based for the members of your audience that remember, you know, flash on the web, it’s gone now. But so we’ve gone through many, you know, technology cycles, and also these these cycles of data where originally it was Google Maps was kind of the only provider that could do the job. And then as soon as OpenStreetMap started to become useful, one of the first things that we did with it was, I don’t know if you recall, this was also a long time ago, but with the old Garmin units, you could put in a SD card, a map card to get base maps and you would buy a Garmin unit and it would not have base maps and It was a really complicated process to get the OpenStreetMaps database onto one of these map cards. And so we had some users that were asking us about this, and we started a little side business out of it, I think we had we sold, I don’t know, 1000s of these map cards from our website so that Garmin users could have base maps based on open street maps. So that was kind of our first experience with open street maps as a business. And since then, we’ve built out, you know, a bunch of servers, we host a lot of infrastructure that’s based on open street maps, we have, you know, a vector map server, and we have a server to go, you can type in like the name of a city or an address and go look it up against our servers there. And we have routing servers that are based on OpenStreetMaps with other data so that you can, you know, get your point A to point B routing. So so we, you know, we love OpenStreetMaps, and we rely on it more and more and more as time goes on.

Carlton Reid 35:53
And because one of the reason I was asking that is because OpenStreetMaps has kind of got like, sometimes if you’re using open cycle map, the version of open street map that’s for bikes, there’s a surface level, there’s a surface layer, which you can you can then you can then work out, you know, which part of your your route is is, is gravel, which is dirt, which is which is paved, etc, etc. So, you’ve got a in 2021, I see here in your, your linear progress was when you added surface types, so surface types, are they submitted by users by members? Or is that some that you’re pulling it in? You’re pulling in the data from elsewhere?

Zack Ham 36:37
We’re pulling that in from open street maps. And, you know, there’s, it’s, it’s complicated, though, because the way that things are tagged in the OpenStreetMap database, you know, in one area, something might be tagged in a way that you have to infer, okay, if if it has this tag, but that tag that it’s actually paved in the state of California, but if it has these other two tags, then well, it’s then it’s unpaved, or what have you. So, you know, similar to your conversation with with, with Richard from cycle travel, you know, the way that he was talking about how they have country by country, routing, and everything based on just different usages of the OpenStreetMap database that vary by region. You know, that’s kind of exactly how we think about surface type is just trying to understand how people are using open street maps in their community. And doing our best to simplify that down, you know, you know, in Germany, where they have every street lamp, they also differentiate between, you know, gravel, or brick, or dirt, or single track or these, you know, a grassy path. And it’s up to us to, to narrow that down to what cyclists on our platform really care about, which is, look, is it paved, or is it unpaved? And sometimes answering that question is a little a little more complicated than just this binary, yes or no.

Carlton Reid 38:07
So tell me what other maps do you have, we tell everybody what you can actually choose from when you when you go in, you can say, right, for this particular route, you might want this particular map, you know, there’s this there are times when you did want different maps for different things. That’s me, I maybe that’s just me, what maps have you got?

Zack Ham 38:26
No, it’s not not just you, we’ve always supported, you know, the maps that people are asking for. So we have our own. Our own vector map that we’ve put a lot of time into, we actually recently recently launched a new version of it, and we call it RGB GPS cycle. And, and it’s quite nice, actually, it brings all the cycling infrastructure out, you know, lets people see peaks kind of de emphasises the motorways or the the highways that people might not want to ride on. So it’s a great cycling map. And that’s our default. But then we have the suite of maps from Google their map view, their satellite view, a lot of people really like switching, you know, between our map and the Google satellite view, because it’s yeah, it’s a really good satellite view. And if you’re doing adventurer writing, you can if we don’t have surface type data, you can double check with satellite and say, oh, you know, that doesn’t look very paved. And then we also have some of the OSM once we have the OSM the standard OSM map, the OSM cycle map, OSM outdoor map that comes from Thunder forest, it’s a really great company that makes some really nice map styles. We have a topo map from Esri, which is a lot of people like because it’s really crisp and clean and has a lot of detail, especially for people that are going kind of into the back country. They appreciate those contour lines on the on the top of a map and extra information that’s on there. And then we also have maps from the US Geological Survey, which you know, aren’t as relevant over where you’re at, but in the US These are to some people sort of like how you view your Ordnance Survey maps, at least when it comes to when you get out of the populated areas. They’re they’ve been around for a long time, you know, they’re built by the government, there’s a lot of great detail in those. And we have some old scans of the raster maps that provide, you know, a certain level of detail. And then we also have their newer vector topo maps, which you know, provide a different level of detail and represented in a different way.

Carlton Reid 40:28
And they, you can toggle through them, if you’re a paid member, or if you’re that’s, that’s with the no pay subscription.

Zack Ham 40:36
Now we let we let everyone do that. And when it comes to our paid or unpaid options in the in the route planner, it’s really, you don’t really hit, you don’t run into limits, or we require a period of count until you do some of the more advanced stuff. So for us, kind of like layers in Photoshop, you can have multiple routes on the map at the same time, we call it multi route editing. And that’s a paid feature. But if you just want to go click, click, click, make yourself a nice route, save it and go ride it, you can do all that for free. Hmm. See,

Carlton Reid 41:11
I’m a historian, right? And the early days of motoring was very much like this, you’d go for pleasure rides, this is this what people are doing, they’re going for pleasure bicycle ride. And that’s what you used to do in a car used to go for pleasure. And motorcar rides. And you can imagine, you know, in the very late 1890s, certainly the early 1900s. You know, if this app was available, then the early motorists would have been all over this, but you’re not going to get a motor and maybe a motorcyclist, yes. But you’re not going to get a motorist doing this. So this, your your kind of core customers are basically doing this, they’re very geeky, probably. And they’re doing this for pleasure. Whereas if you’re downloading, you know, a sat nav app, as a motorist, you’re going to be using that for probably not actually that pleasurable in many times to drive places, whereas you’re offering a product that’s actually a very pleasurable pleasurable thing to be doing.

Zack Ham 42:11
We’d like to think so I mean, that’s, that’s why we all well, not all of us all the time. But that’s why I like to think we all come to work with a smile on our faces, because that’s when we deal with, when we deal with a customer, or anybody that’s using our product, you know, most of the time, they’re really doing something that’s cool. And we’re helping enable that, we, you know, it’s so great when we hear from people who will write in and say, you know, I just did this trans America route, and I don’t know how I would have done it without you guys, you know, without your without your software without the data that I was able to get from, from ride with GPS. So that’s, that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing. You know, we think bikes are a special thing, where you get outside, which is more and more rare these days, you know, you are with people like real human beings in real life, which we also think is more rare and a special thing, and you get some exercise, you get used to move through space, it’s a very human activity. So we hope that people, you know, we hope people cycle for for, you know, to get to work and to go get their groceries and do all that we’re big supporters of cycling in general, but really our, our focus is people who go out and want to do this recreationally, go on an adventure, have fun with friends, and, and just don’t want to have a don’t want to have an undesirable experience. You know, a lot of people do want to go out and take risks and go on that adventure where they really don’t know exactly what’s going to be around the next corner. And they love our software, too. But you all know that we’re really being successful when somebody who’s very risk averse, who really doesn’t want to get into trouble, who wants to know exactly what they’re going to do goes on a ride that they’ve never been on before, where nobody there with knows more than they do. And it’s because our software kind of gives them that confidence gives them that comfort that they can go and do something new, and know that they’re not going to run into trouble.

Carlton Reid 44:06
Hmm. Night Before we were talking about how you’re bootstrapped, and how you had 30 Plus members of staff and you’ve been profitable since since the time you you’re taking fees, basically. But then you’ve also just recently, I mean, we’re talking September is my my story here. You’ve got $3 million from an undisclosed strategic investor. So those are always things where you ask people and they won’t tell you because if it’s not on the news story, they people don’t want to tell you which is fine. Unless you do want to tell me but I My question is going to be what you’re going to do with that money. What what what features what what expansion? is that money going to be funding?

Zack Ham 44:53
You know, that’s, yeah, it’s it’s one of those funny things when I was bringing this news back to back to our team You know, because our roots are in r&b and bootstrapped, we’ve always been very proud of that. And so thinking about like, Well, I haven’t changed, my partner hasn’t changed. And we’re bringing on this new partner. So, you know, what’s, what does that what does that mean? Like, why would we have done this? Like? How do people kind of understand this? The truth is, we’ve been working with this guy since 2020. His name’s Jason Eken. Roth, he’s like a super fan of our product. He has been a paid user since 2016. And, and he’s been kind of a mentor, frankly, to me for the past three years, and he’s been wanting to get involved in the business. He’s had a successful software startup in the past. Right now, passion is his cycling, it has been for many years. He’s based in Europe, which is a market we know, we don’t know enough about, and we’re very interested in. So he’s just been like a great friend, mentor, somebody who gives a lot of professional advice. And we’ve been trying to figure out a way for him to have a seat around the table to welcome him in as a partner, so that he can spend more time with us and really help us do what we’re already doing better. And so we figured out a way to do that, where he could be a minority partner. But if you haven’t been there since the beginning, and you’re not working a full time job and getting equity, how do you become a partner, you have to buy your way in. And so, you know, it really isn’t about the money, it’s about the partner. And so it’s like, okay, well, what are you going to do with the money? Nothing, right now, we’re, we’re profitable, we were planning on hiring 10 more people, you know, toward the end of this year and early next year, before we planned on welcoming him on, and we don’t want to just blow the company up with a bunch of new staff. So we’re really not going to change our plan at this point. So maybe an opportunity will come up, and we’ll be we’ll have a little more comfort to take advantage of that, you know, have a little more courage. But that opportunity hasn’t come up yet. So we’ll see. I mean, we have the future, I think is really opportunistic. For us, there’s a lot of things we can do. So it’ll be nice to have a little more courage, but really, it’s about the guidance of, of him as an individual.

Carlton Reid 47:06
Presumably, the meetings when it’s behind around the table are like zoom meetings, if he’s in Europe,

Zack Ham 47:12
he was actually down here last week, and I’m gonna go, I’m gonna go out there and visit him here pretty soon as well. So we’ll be getting together in person, pretty frequently. And And again, that’s, you know, it wouldn’t probably wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense for that to be happening if he wasn’t an actual partner in the business. So it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be a lot of fun, I think it’s gonna be really exciting.

Carlton Reid 47:34
So how big if you got brought down a European investor? How big? Are you outside of the US? I mean, how much of a focus Have you had else, you know, outside of the US and previously made? Will that change?

Zack Ham 47:47
Well, are yes, the majority of our customer base has always been based in the US. And, you know, we actually have a quite quite a large contingent of, of users in the UK. And then other other English speaking areas, you know, so we have quite a few, quite a few users in Australia, for example, good contingent in South Africa, and whatnot, but you know, our, our penetration into like France, Italy, Germany, you know, even even the Netherlands and whatnot, is, it could be a lot better, that’s for sure. And we have quite a few users over there just by number, but in terms of compared to the opportunity, it could be a lot more. And so our focus mostly over there has been with our tour operator partners. And so really, the, honestly, a lot of the people that we’ve supported in Europe, are Americans who are going overseas on these on these week long bike tours. And so we get a lot of usage over there. It’s just usage from people who are travelling, who are having this curated experience. So that’s been most of our experience in that market. Whereas in the US, we’re very integrated into like the local cycling scene by virtue of these partnerships with bike clubs and people that are running events.

Carlton Reid 49:05
Yeah, that that saw dinner event I mentioned was was one American, know those two brands, but they were both journalists. On the on the trips, everybody else was Americans and America, it’s an Italian company. But as far as I can see, most of our clientele are, are Americans. I guess that’s why they’ve used ride with GPS, because that’s, that’s more familiar to Americans. Now, obviously, I want to end now but uh, normally I would ask people, you know, what’s the URL? Where can we get more information? But it’s kind of obvious what your URL URL is. And like, I’m sure absolutely your Instagrams the same, everything is probably exactly the same as to Yes. We really don’t have to discuss what the URL might be. Now that How about you personally? Are you on social media in your own right, or is it always going to be you’re a corporate person and that’s That’s you’ll only find Zack as as Robert GPS

Zack Ham 50:03
No, I’m, I’m you know, I don’t post much on anything but but I’m certainly out there, you know, people are welcome to email me directly that’s za CK at Robert gps.com I always welcome and I see email or you know, you can follow me on Instagram, maybe I’ll post something and I think my most recent videos of me skateboarding so you can see that I don’t just ride a bike. And that’s Zach cam as well. So yeah, I’m on LinkedIn, I’m kind of I probably have a Twitter or x account or whatever they’re calling it now that I that I don’t use but I’m reachable through all those places.

Carlton Reid 50:38
Thanks to Zach Ham there and thanks to you for listening to Episode 340 of the spokesman podcast brought to you in association with Tern bicycles, show notes and more can be found at the-spokesman.com. The next episode features an upbeat chat with Carla Francome who talks candidly about her knockers. That is, her social media critics, of course, That show will be out early next week. But meanwhile, get out there and ride

5th September 2023

The Spokesmen Cycling Podcast

EPISODE 337: Cycle.Travel: In Conversation with Richard Fairhurst

SPONSOR: Tern Bicycles

HOST: Carlton Reid

GUEST: Richard Fairhurst

TOPICS: Interview with Cycle.travel routing website founder Richard Fairhurst.

TRANSCRIPT

Carlton Reid 0:13
Welcome to Episode 337 of the Spokesmen cycling podcast. This show was engineered on Tuesday 5th of September 2023.

David Bernstein 0:28
The Spokesmen cycling roundtable podcast is brought to you by Tern bicycles. The good people at Tern are committed to building bikes that are useful enough to ride every day and dependable enough to carry the people you love. In other words, they make the kind of bikes that they want to ride. Tern has e-bikes for every type of rider. Whether you’re commuting, taking your kids to school or even carrying another adult, visit www.ternbicycles.com. That’s t e r n bicycles.com to learn more.

Carlton Reid 1:04
I’m Carlton Reid. And over the next two episodes, uploaded at once, I talked to the folks in charge of cycle routing apps bikemap of Austria and cycle.travel of Oxfordshire. Episode 338 is with Bikemap’s Chief Operations Officer Bruna de Guimaraes , but this episode is a chat with Cycle.travel’s. Richard Fairhurst. Both interviews were done remotely with me firing up the desktop versions and playing with the smartphone apps. So here’s Richard …

Richard Fairhurst 1:44
Yeah, so I live in this place called charlbury which is about 20 miles outside Oxford, just on the edge of the Cotswolds. And it’s lovely this was held on the National Cycle network, which is always good also has a train station, which is good for somewhere this size. I think Mr. Beeching must have overlooked us somehow. But yeah, lovely place and very cycling friendly,

Carlton Reid 2:06
Which is like kind of helps what you do then.

Richard Fairhurst 2:08
Yeah, totally, totally. And it’s, it’s always been. I mean, obviously, Oxford and Oxfordshire is a bit of a hotbed of cycling in a lot of ways. But yes, as I say, we have a National Cycle network routes going pretty much past my house. And that was actually something that I was involved in setting up. I’m a sauce trans volunteer, in this part of the world and helped design the route. And one of the things I’ve always tried to do with cycle travel is have it so that it will find you a route which is good, as good as a human designer, that if you want to go from I don’t know, Oxford to let’s say Coventry or something like that. And no one has set out a route that goes that way, then within the confines of the infrastructure, it should find you the best route possible. At least that’s the plan.

Carlton Reid 3:01
So in another hotbed of cycling, Cambridgeshire, you have Cyclestreets, and Cyclestreets that I know, cuz I used them for my the bike hub app many, many years ago. Now that that cleverness comes from the way that it routes. So it’s the routing engine is the real powerhouse there. And lots of sites and lots of maps have used that routing engine for their own apps, but you’ve clearly using OpenStreetMap. We’ll get into that in a second. But so how are you physically generating the route? So when you said that it’s like a human? How do you make your routing engine like a human?

Richard Fairhurst 3:44
OK, so this is an interesting one. So I think cyclestreets, I have huge amounts of time for. I know, Martin quite well. And we’ve worked on a couple of projects together. There, their angle is more towards commuting, and practical, everyday cycling, cycle travel, you can use it for commuting, and people do. But it also has really quite a strong tilt towards leisure cycling, and touring and longer rides like that. So if you are going from landscapes join groups, then cycle travel will find your good route. If you go from New York to San Francisco, it will hopefully find you a good route. But as you say, it’s all about the routing engine. The routing engine effectively with any route planner is a set of opinions. It’s a set of opinions about which road is good to cycle on and which one isn’t. cycled travels, opinions are obviously very much aligned to mine. But also, I’ve been involved in OpenStreetMap for 19 years now, pretty much since the first few months of the project, and know how the data works there quite well. So there’s a lot of sort of little things there. I think you know, if we’re going along a track in France, and it’s rated as a grade two track, well, actually the French mappers are a bit more, a bit more optimistic about the state of the unpaved tracks and the British mappers. So let’s mark it down a little bit, because yeah, that’s how they map things in France. So it’s the sort of the accumulation of all of that sort of knowledge. Pretty much gives cycled travel. It’s its personality, but also its opinions on what sort of route to follow.

Carlton Reid 5:28
So clearly, cyclestreets, the streets part is the clue there. And the dot travel is the clue there. So that’s, that’s, that’s how you’re differentiating is just your more long distance in effect?

Richard Fairhurst 5:40
Yeah, absolutely. Yes, it’s very much just says on the tin. And I remember the first time in sort of first couple of years at the site that someone emailed me and said, I’ve just used it to plan a route from Shropshire to Rome, was absolutely great. It took me down to farm track in France, which I would rather not have cycled longer apart from that it was spot on. And I thought, yeah, okay, this is what it’s meant to be about. This is the idea.

Carlton Reid 6:04
And if you’ve spent nearly 19 years on OpenStreetMap, you’re nearly on 10 years for cycle.travel. So 2014 is one of the first references I can find online. Maybe you were doing before then. So is that 2014 When you started or was it bit before it was end of 2013.

Richard Fairhurst 6:22
So a little bit of background. This is kind of it’s a bit of a change of career for me. Before this, I was a magazine editor used to editor magazine called Waterways World, which if you know anything about canals, boats, rivers, that sort of thing you may have stumbled across. And boating waterways is always something I’ve done. And for one of the magazines I’d worked for, I’d got into the habit of drawing the maps for it, because we needed a map to show where the canals went. And I sort of fell into cartography that way. And from there, it was a reasonably obvious thing, because I love cycling, I always love cycling, to start to draw cycle maps. And as I went along with a, it may be I can make a bit more of a career out of this. But also, I see these routing sites out there, I see that you can ask Google or whatever it might be for a route from Oxford to Woucester, and it’s not the route that I would want to cycle along. I do not feel happy with choosing the routes that it’s selected. So I’m going to have go to my own. And it’s absolutely taken off from there. And I’d be delighted with how much people enjoy it.

Carlton Reid 7:31
Hmm. And there’s also Heritage magazine. You had a So describe that directory waterways World Heritage magazine. It did you train in that did your How did you get into that didn’t get in to begin with?

Richard Fairhurst 7:47
Okay, so age 14, or 15 or so I was your archetypal 1980s, computer geek. And I had a Amstrad home computer, you might remember those, not that dissimilar to spectrums, and things like that. And I had to play around with it as teenagers tend to and got reasonably okay programming things on it. And for three, one thing or another, I ended up being the freelance technical writer for a magazine called Amstrad Action. And Amstrad Action has a bit of cycling connection in this it was the first magazine ever published by Future publishing, itt started the entire company off. And obviously, they went on to do Cycling Plus, mountain bike magazines, and cyclingnews and things like that. So that’s all I’m selections fault. Ultimately, I then went off to university, but I got started in, in journalism after this. So it came as a reasonably obvious thing to do, after university to go for jobs on magazines. I already had this on my CV. And because I enjoyed boating, I went to the canal magazines. First of all, I then spent a while, as you say, editing heritage magazine, which was a sister magazine to the canal magazine that worked out at the time. And that was an interesting experience. Because you think, okay, heritage magazine, it’s all about going around the countryside and country houses and that sort of thing. It must be quite a nice fluffy thing to work on. And it is. But on the other hand, actually, 90% of the readership were Americans, and they knew a huge amount about country houses and about Shakespeare and all of that, you know, this was their identity. They loved the old country, as it were. And I’ve never been that great on Shakespeare, to be honest. So I spent a few months there and it was good fun. But I said after that, I’m going going back to the canal, some controversy about canals, because I know about that.

Carlton Reid 9:41
On your on your site, you describe yourself as an Open Street Map. OpenStreetMap. Activist, so that’s not just a contributor. You’re a bit more than just a contributor on open streets. I was trying to find out the segway from Heritage Magazine. Then waterways world into how you got into being quite active on the OpenStreetMap. Community. Yeah.

Richard Fairhurst 10:07
So as you say, I have spent all this time with cycling magazines and waterway magazines and then got into drawing the maps for them. And there’s always been a problem with any map that you’ve got to get the source data from somewhere unless you literally go out and survey absolutely everything yourself, which gets impractical when you’re doing a whole new canal every month, then you’ve got to get the data from somewhere. And in historically, in Britain, you would get it from the Ordnance Survey. And at the time, Ordnance Survey would basically charge you through the nose through any data that they might daintily have. They’re so much better now. But that was the case back then. And I kind of worked out that, well, the thing about canals is they haven’t moved much. Most of them were built before 1850, I can find some old maps out of copyright. And I can just trace the canals off there. And we’re fine, we bought them suddenly got all sorts of data. So this became, this became a little bit of a project. And I ended up collecting the entirety of the Ordnance Survey one inch maps of England and Wales for the 1930s and 1940s, which was at the time, the last set that were out of copyright. So I found a place that would scan stuff in bulk for you, and said, you know, will you be prepared to scan this? And they said, Yep, two quid a map, we’ll do it. So I gave them 150 maps, they gave me a DVD with scans of the board on which was quite something. And then this guy called Steve Coast started OpenStreetMap. And all of a sudden, I think well hang on. This is a it’s a really interesting project for what he’s doing. But also, I’ve got all these old maps. And it’s not just canals that haven’t moved. Most of the railways, lots of country roads, lots of rivers, obviously, maybe this would be an interesting angle to work together on this. So this was about four months after OpenStreetMap had started. I said, Okay, I’m interested in maps, I’ve got this sort of stuff going on. I’d like to be part of this. And so I’ve been asked that as part of OpenStreetMap from its very early days. And in the first year, we literally had about six or seven or eight paths and roads in Regent’s Park. And that was the sum total of the world map. And now it’s everything is everything everywhere. It’s astonishing how it’s, and I think he did my great surprise for how the project was taking off was, I don’t know, maybe sort of seven or eight years into the project, I went on holiday to China. And it was one of these sort of things where, obviously, you’ve got fairly limited freedom of movement there. But we it mean that we had good guests, good guides, and a good itinerary planned out and all of that. And we were walking on some fairly obscure paths in a rice farming area. And the Chinese government is very anxious about people surveying their country, they don’t like it too, you know, you’ve got to have all of these permits to allow you to do this, and they don’t get permits to OpenStreetMap volunteers. And so this, this is a bit of a problem. But as a good OpenStreetMap activist, I can’t not survey where I’ve gotten here. And this is unthinkable. So I had little Garmin GPS recording a track tucked into my side pocket hoping that no one was going to notice it. And okay, fine, I do that I get a bunch of railways as well, because we travelled around by train, get all of this stuff, go back home ready to upload this into OpenStreetMap ready to map it. And I find out this already been done. It’s already been done by a bunch of Germans who’ve been to China on holiday and have done all of this six months a year before me at that point, I thought well, you know, okay, this is taking off. If even these remote places in China, where you go to are being mapped by volunteers, then this is really gonna go somewhere. And it has you know, now, now Facebook now Microsoft Now Amazon, all of these big companies use OpenStreetMap and that’s the thing we started building 19 years ago.

Carlton Reid 14:09
And then you’re talking about the effect. We’re a bit of a word a bunch of geeks basically. You know, taking GPS tracks and then uploading and then digitising etc, etc. So they tend to be geeks. I think I can’t be too but doing all effort as a volunteer you know, that’s very that takes a lot of time. Obviously a lot of expertise. But then you’re translating that into into a business. So with with your with cycle dot travel. And why did you charge so why why is cycled not travel, not charging and other other navigation sites, websites and apps that are bike friendly? bike friendly routing,

Richard Fairhurst 15:01
they do charge. So why don’t you charge, I could talk for hours about cycle navigation apps, business models is a fascinating subject, or at least its history. So if you look at the really big guys, then you look at people like Strava, or commute or whoever it might be their, you know, their business model, as you say, it’s very much based on charging, the standard thing for this sort of site is that this sort of app in particular, is that you pay five pounds a month, and get turn by turn routing, and you get offline maps and things like that. Now, the thing about Stryver and commute is they have got a staff of 1000s of think commuter employ about 120 people, they have got marketing budgets, commensurate with that, these are the big guys, I am me sitting in a little converted barn in the back of my house in Charlbury, I can’t compete on that level. So I’m not going to fight that game. Instead, what I try and do is say, Okay, I’m going to put this up there, I really hope that it finds good roots for people, I find, I hope that someone who was going to use it to go from Shropshire to Rome, or just had someone going across America with it, we have people doing routes across France across Britain all the time, I hope that people will do that, find a good route and be so happy with the site that they choose to donate. So what you can do with cycling travel as you can become a supporter, you can give two pounds a month or five pounds a month, whatever you see fit. And you know, you didn’t get a few extra baubles for that you get a few maps, which I have to pay for. So Ordnance Survey maps, IGN in France, that sort of thing. But by and large, it’s largely the same. But I hope that people will be sufficiently happy with the site and with the routes that it finds support them, that they will choose to support it. And they do. You know, others now, hundreds of people have signed up to become supporters of cycle travel, it pays its own way in terms of service costs. And all of that is getting towards paying its own way. In terms of my time on it, I think I’m not that far off. And that that’s brilliant, because it means I can spend more time doing what I love. And it means that people get great holidays, great bike routes. So that’s absolutely what I’m in it for.

Carlton Reid 17:24
So, as you said, there are quite a few other sites and apps out there. What are they doing? Well, and what are they not doing? Well? Can you can you be rude in that way?

Richard Fairhurst 17:38
Okay, so Well, I’ll tell you the easy one, which is the site that I have absolutely the most respectful and that’s Ride With GPS, I think they are brilliant. They really know their audience. Their proposition is quite different from what I do. Their proposition is more about organising routes, saving routes, saving rides. They’ve got an absolute suite of editing tools for your groups, all sorts of things that, you know, I would never dream of doing a month of Sundays. I think, you know, obviously, I am biassed, I think their core A to B routine is not as strong cycle travels, it will put you on a busy road more often than I do. But I think you know, for their audience, what they do is absolutely fantastic. They’re bootstrapped. They haven’t taken external funding. They’ve got a small team of about I think 15 to 20 people working in Portland in Oregon, now the great cycling city, and what they do is brilliant. So yeah. What I was gonna say, which is nice about other people, I mean, you know, both both Strava and commuter ecosystems, really Strava for a lot of people is cycling commute has all of this stuff where it gets you into their apps, and all of the safe, your highlights and all of that sort of thing. But which is the sort of thing you’ve got, you’ve got 120 people to do, and they pay influencers to go out and have great rides and say, does this with Caboose and that sort of thing. It’s a different level of doing things. And you know, I have plenty of time for them. As I say up cycled travels, strength, I think is the is the routing and the actual routes that it will find for you. But yeah, a lot of a lot of time for that. And of course, as you mentioned earlier, cyclestreets cyclestreets have been doing this for a long time longer than I have. They have absolutely got the city routing down to a tee. If you are going across London or Cambridge, then cyclestreets will find you a terrific route and always has done so. Yeah. And another obviously another great thing that cyclestreets does, is that they do a lot of advocacy, advocacy type work. They work with Robin lovely cert active travel England now they do stuff with local authorities. And in fact, the other year, I was involved in a project with them and TfL because TfL TfL a few years ago, spent, I think 2 million pounds on producing this cycle infrastructure database, which is this massive collection of data on every single bit of cycle infrastructure in London, it’s quite an endeavour. And this was fine. And they used it for their own purposes. And it was just sitting there and they thought, well hang on. If we get this data into OpenStreetMap, then we can actually get it out there and used by people. So you get it into OpenStreetMap, it then feeds into all the different mapping apps. And then people will start to be able to use this knowledge that TfL have gathered about where all the good infrastructure is. And so we spent a few months working on that it has started to filter through. And you will find now that most of the mapping apps, not just me, not just cyclestreets will now make better decisions in London as a result of this. And nice to follow up about this is that TfL, then, last year had a cycle routing Summit. And they invited me for cycle travel, Martin from cycle streets, and a bunch of other people from the big guys. So from Apple from Google, and such, like, and basically they put Martin and me up on stage and said, Okay, so this is cycle travel, this is cycle streets, they are finding good routes across London. And we would like you from Apple and you from Google to talk to these guys and find out how they’re doing it. Because they’re finding better routes. And we if we’re going to spend 2 billion pounds on building cycle super highways across London, we sure as heck want your apps to direct people to use them. And at that point, they weren’t doing it. I think Apple are doing quite interesting things with cycle boosting in cities. And they’re starting to do that. Google, I mean, Google have a product for cycle routing, but it’s it’s tuned to San Francisco, and it doesn’t necessarily work that well in the rest of world some places it does. So

Carlton Reid 21:45
you’re right. I mean, Apple, Apple is doing some very interesting things, obviously have got very deep pockets. And and can do interesting things. Do you think even with the deepest pocket in the world, you’re never really going to catch up with OpenStreetMap? Or do you think something like Apple could, you know, the way that they’re mapping everything that satellites, you know, they’re sending cars round, they’re sending bikes round and pedestrians round a bit like Google Streetview are doing? And then everything is, you know, obviously read so you know, you’re getting the speed limit is read from the round holes that the cameras are that AI is spotting, or do you think there’ll always be something about the crowdsource nature of OpenStreetMap that will always be done that how much money you pump into a map? Absolutely, yes.

Richard Fairhurst 22:36
OpenStreetMaps great strength is that it is an agglomeration of local knowledge. Basically, every single contributor brings their local knowledge to the map. So if you know about a little cut through, then you put that into OpenStreetMap, it might only be 1050 metres between two streets, but it could save two miles off a bike route. And that goes in that instantly makes everyone’s ride better. It’s very, very difficult for even the best street view cameras and AI processing to pick up that level of detail. And so I think OpenStreetMap has always got that knowledge, but also OpenStreetMap is, to large extent built by cyclists. Certainly in Britain, we found that a lot of the earliest OSM contributors were cyclists who wanted a decent map for cycling, and couldn’t get on anywhere else. It’s really notable that one of the earliest breakthroughs of the project was when that smart smart guy figured out how to reverse engineer the mapping format for Garmin GPS. So within a few months of this, people had got OpenStreetMap on their Garmins as the base map all of a sudden, and it had all of these cut throughs in and it had the MCN. And they had all of this sort of thing. And that obviously that then made people’s bike routing experience the cycling experience so much better. And I think it’d be very, very hard for Apple or Google with all the AI in the world to catch up with that they will be able to give you the best freeway routing experience in San Francisco, because they’ve got, you know, surveying cars going along with caught with cameras on every single angle. But they didn’t put that sort of effort into cycling. And last week, I think it was actually on one of the Silicon Valley Tech forums, there was an anonymous poster from someone who used to work for Google Maps, saying, Yeah, I used to work there. And I tried to put a bit more effort into the cycle routing, and he got stomped on from on high for privacy reasons. They said, No, we can’t really do this. And they don’t work there anymore. And they said, you know, cycling isn’t really a priority for Google to be honest. It doesn’t make them a lot of money. They are ultimately a self driving car company these days. OpenStreetMap is to a large extent Made by cyclists, it’s in our interest to make the routine better.

Carlton Reid 25:02
Hmm. So, with your Heritage magazine background, I don’t know how much you know about cycling history. But of course, cyclists have always been really keen on mapping. You know, the the Bartholomew maps, the cyclists are very interested in the, you know, the, the route books that cyclists created in the 1870s 1880s, that incredibly interested in, in road surfaces. And I’ve written whole books about this. Very interested, but it just in mapping in general, so like the CTC work, such as Touring Club, as was very, very involved with the mapping companies. One of the maps I used in my book was a, which were the CTC was heavily involved with for a long time. And was you basically using crowdsourcing to do this an early version of Open Street Map, where they were where they were mapping road surfaces. So there was a there was a batholomew map where every single street surface was mapped. And if you look at the bottom, we oh, how was this mapped? It was done by cyclists who were then contributing, you know, their information to the local council. He was then putting it or she was probably he was putting it through to Bartholomew. And then they produce these incredibly detailed maps of you know, here’s where the tarmac was, here’s where the asphalt or here’s where the macadam was, here’s where the wooden streets were. And it’s these incredibly dense, almost Open Street Map dense maps of London and done by cyclists in the 18 1890s. So you are in a rich tradition there, Richard?

Richard Fairhurst 26:47
Absolutely. And that’s, that’s terrific. Because, again, it’s looking at cycling has never had the money that’s behind the auto industry. If you are Apple or Google, then it’s in your financial interest to plough huge amounts of money into into car routing, because that’s where the money is. Cyclists, as you say, do it for themselves and always have done and I think OpenStreetMap is a great example of that. We found in the early days in Britain, that actually cyclists were keen on it the walkers because walkers have always had fabulous maps in Britain, they have the Ordnance Survey, and we’ve always had a bit of resistance there you see, say to people come and contribute to OpenStreetMap. You can put all your favourite hiking paths on it and say, Well, why would I want to do that? I’ve got an OS map, where a cyclist got it from day one. They knew that there was nothing out there at the time. That was giving them a decent map. And so yeah, right, I can get this I’m going there to put all my favourite roads in it.

Carlton Reid 27:46
I’m going to I’m going to go across to my colleague in America right now for a brief interlude, a commercial interlude. However, when we come back, I would like to you basically you talk me through how to use the online version and the the one that I’ve got on my, my my smartphone, my iPhone. So take it away, David.

David Bernstein 28:10
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Carlton Reid 29:09
Thanks, David. And we are back with Richard Fairhurst. And before David’s ad break bear or David’s not his ad break but Tern’s ad break narrated by David thanks so much, David. I was asking Richard if he would guide me. So give me so on the on the on the website. And on the the app. There is a section which actually says how to use the app and you can drill down but can you and this is like the end of the world of radio here. So it’s difficult it’s not visual but just if you can basically take what what do I start with? What what are the things that as an absolute beginner when I’m opening up either on the desktop or on the smartphone? What should I be looking for and give me some tips on being a power user give me straight into being a power user. That how you would use this app when say you reach your either plan, give me two versions, where you are planning say a holiday somewhere you’ve never been to before. And when you physically there on the ground with your smartphone, so give me the power user tips give me give me the the startup guide, even though this is purely audio and not visual.

Richard Fairhurst 30:27
Okay, so cycle travel, the URL that you type into your web browser is simply that it’s just cycle dot travel, or you can google it of course, and you go straight there to the homepage, and it will give you two boxes where you type in where you’re going from and where you’re going to. So I am sitting here with a site now I shall type in classic test that I’m going to go from Land’s End it autocompletes it so that’s fine says it lands in Cornwall, UK, UK name John O’Groats and actually second walked out on the group’s Caithness Scotland. That’s what we Yeah, so I do that it has found me a route. And you will see that the route opens up on the map, you have got the lines there with mile markers every 100 miles. It says it’s 992 miles, which sounds about right, you’ve got a bunch of little tools that you can use to play around with the route on the left, but the core of it is on the right. And that’s it’s broken it down into the various different types. So it says your 71% on paved road 14% on paved path, you’ll notice that only 8% on busy roads. And this really tells you about the sort of routine that cycle travelled likes doing, people will cycle from lands and xiana groups and spend 100 Miles going up the marches on day 49, non intimate, that sort of thing. It’s all about quiet roads, things like old railway paths, decent quality tow paths, that sort of thing. So it has found this route. The power user tip, and you can go absolutely wild with this is that you can then drag it. So you get your mouse you hold the mouse down on a bit, and then you drag it to where you want to go. So let’s say I want it to go through Oxford, I have just done that. And it has now found me the best route it can from Land’s End to John O’Groats via Oxford, and either via point has little one on it. So that is the first via point. Let’s put another one in, we’re going to go through Lincoln. Number two, you can put up to 200 in there. And people do I have seen the most amazing intricate routes that people will plot with that. And that’s that, okay. So what we can then do is let’s have a look at this. It’s 1074 miles. Now, you’re not going to cycle that in a day, I realised that we’re recording this a few days after Paris-Best-Paris, and there are people listening who probably do this sort of thing in a few days. But I’m not going to do this in a day, certainly. So you will see on the left this it says under route summary total length of 1000s centrical miles suggest overnight stops. So to click that. And it suggests that if we’re taking an average distance per day of 60 miles, then we can do it in 18 days, and there’s a little button on either side of 18 days, we can make that a bit shorter or longer. So let’s take it down to 14 days, because that’s kind of common way of doing lands and junk routes. And okay, that’s taken us up 77 miles a day. Let’s say we’ve got to get the train to pens amps on the first day. So that’s going to reduce our cycling time there. So we take a short first day, that’s fine, take split. And you will see that it’s put these points along the way, each of which has got a little moon symbol on there overnight stops, and five points as well. So you can drag those around. And you’ll see. So it’s suggesting places we might want to stop one of those, let’s say let’s have a look in it’s found walnut, which is between Bridgewater and Glastonbury, which sounds like a nice part of the world. So what I’m going to do, I’m going to click that on the map, and you’ll see a little bubble pops up. And it says, Okay, this is a via point. It’s on a minor road, we know all that sort of stuff. And you’ll see a bunch of links for stuff you can do there. One of those links is nearby accommodation. So I’m going to click that. And you see there are a bunch of icons show up and those are for campsites and for Bnbs and for hotels that are near the plates we’ve selected. You can turn different types of those off. So I’m going to say I’m I don’t want I don’t want chain hotels. I want individual ones. That’s good. So here we go. We have found Sunnyside Bed and Breakfast. That sounds nice. So I click that. It brings up this window about it. I can check availability and book, click through on that. And that takes me straight to to booking.com and that will give me a chance to book that for whatever days I’m interested in. So I can clear that out the way something that people are always He’s interested in is elevation, how much climbing you’ve got to do. And cycle travel, of course has an elevation graph. That’s one of the icons on the left. So I’m going to click that Show elevation. And it comes up with the elevation graph. What is important here is that it is broken it down into every individual day. So I can see that, for example, on the second day, because we’re going through Cornwall and corners like that. We’ve got 1700 metres of elevation. So that’s going to be a tough one. Take your mouse along there, click on an individual point. And it will take you to that particular point on the back, I recognise that I’ve written that several times. That’s the place just above camelford, where it’s sort of an old air base, and you’ve got this dead pancake pancake straight road at the top of a hill. And there was always a headwind, seriously, it must have written that three or four times and there was always a headwind. So you can find your way through the route like that. You’ll also see if you click anywhere on the route doesn’t have to be via point, you can just click anywhere on the blue line. Then, when the window comes up, within two pop up window, you’ve got two things at the bottom one says find photos. And the other says Street View, Street View is fairly self explanatory, that will open Google Street View at that particular place. So if you’re not sure about what the route is going to be like, you can eyeball it before you set off. Obviously, the disadvantage of Street View is that Google sends its Street View cars along roads, it doesn’t send the belong tracks or cycleway that often. So there’s also see photos, click that and you’ll hopefully find a bunch of photos crop up especially on right aways, railway paths, that sort of thing. And so you can have a bit of a look at what the surface is going to be there. And that comes from an absolutely fantastic project called geo graph, which is another crowd sourced based collection of photos from people who have been taking pictures of every single part of the British Isles for, again, 20 years now. So that’s where that comes from. I said blue line earlier, it’s not always a blue line, sometimes it’s a green line. And when it’s a green line, that’s because it’s an off road section. an unpaved section, I should say. So you might find occasionally that will take you along a Canal Towpath, it will try and keep you on two paths and railway paths that are a reasonably good cyclable surface. You know, I absolutely cringed when I think Google Maps first brought out cycle routing, they spoken to the canal and river trust and got their towpath data. And so it sent you a long tow patter every single opportunity including the shops union Canal, which is anyone who cycled it will know is basically a reenactment of the Somme it’s just a quagmire for miles on end. And so you know, toe pattern if it was the same cycle travelled twice to send you along the good ones and not the bad ones. But all of this to say it’s a fairly balanced type of route choice. It likes quiet roads in like scenic roads, it likes good quality tracks, you can also choose a couple of other route profiles as it were the one which is gravel cycling, and that will accentuate the off road again, you know, it will try not to send you on absolute quagmires.

This depends how much data there is an Open Street Map about surface quality, but where it knows these things, it will try and do that. There’s also a paved option that you can choose. And that will try and keep you on paved roads, or paved psychopaths whenever it can, for a bit of in subsidy routing, as well. There’s also a nighttime option. And this is fairly new and experimental. But what that will do is try and keep you on roads and paths that are going to be well lit. And so I think this came actually from an idea I think it was Ruth Hannah McQueen had on Twitter, she said, You know, I want to go cycled back from places in London in the winter. And I don’t particularly want to cycle along the Regent’s canal or across various parks in in winter. And I totally get that you know, it’s cycling supposed to be enjoyable and and part of being enjoyable is safe. So the nighttime option will try and keep you off that sort of thing. But you’ve got those those four options. If you’re using it in different parts of the world, you might not have all of the options. So I don’t do gravel routing in the state as yet, but it’s there across Britain and Europe. What else can I tell you, I think the other the other thing, let’s clear our vans into junk routes route out the way. The other thing that I would highlight is that it’s not just about a to b routing. You can also do a to b and back to A so that’s a round trip. And so let’s say I’m going to go from childfree to Banbury for an afternoon ride. So I click the two places on the map or type them in in the search boxes. And that has found the a 90 mile route. That’s fine. I now have to get home again. I would like to get home a different way. So I click the round trip button and it has found me in a slightly different way, on the way back, it’s cleaving slightly less closely to the nCn. At this place, at this case, few different countries, it’s still the same sort of route, but get so you’ve got a different experience on the way in and out. What you could also do is just click once or type of place wants to set your start point, and the little green point will show up, that’s your start, and then click suggest a ride. And if I do that, then it’s got three circular routes that have come out, come up, or from childfree, or around 25 Miles 1921 27, in this case, and they are round trip routes, which will again try and stick to country lanes and quiet roads. If I want to go for something a bit longer than there’s a slider, I can drag a drag it up to 75 miles. And it’s now sending me off into the Northampton countryside or off into the high Cotswolds and that sort of thing. And it’s found me a nice circular route for that. And that this was quite fun because I used to do this and I think it had a maximum of 75 miles. And I mentioned this to Jack first. And then he said, Oh, no, no, no, you’ve got to take it up to 200. So we can do the audax thing. So you can now take it up to 250 miles, and it will do your reading my readymade or tax that is for people who are harder than me, but it will do that if you want to. So there you go. That’s the that’s the whistlestop tour of the desktop website. If you set up an account, obviously, or free, if you set up an account on the website, then you can save your routes, you can put them in folders, all of that sort of thing. And the reason I mentioned that you can save your routes is that this then becomes useful if you have the mobile app. Now the mobile app, as you say, there is an app for the iPhone, there is one which is literally now in the last days of testing for Android. So this should be ready in the next few days, it may even be ready by the time podcast is edited, which you’ll see. And I’ve had supporters testing that for the last few months. And effectively, you can use the app either as simple ATB routing tool, so you can fire it up and say, I want to go from my current location to somewhere else. And so I’m gonna be here, Banbury, again, type that autocompletes in the app and navigate to bhambri. And it has found me a route from here to battery, that’s fine. But what you can also do is you can use it to navigate along the routes that you have saved from the website. So if I click the little routes icon in the app, then I’ve got all my folders here, let’s say what I’m gonna do, I plotted a nice circuit around Oxfordshire a few weeks back, I’m gonna click that. And that all appears on here. And it gives you turn by turn directions. So you can just put it on the handlebars, and it will say, okay, in how many metres you’ve got a turn coming up. So it says, Turn right here. And do that just the map follows you along. All of that, and, and nicely to fun detail about this on the iPhone app is that I I’ve got the app done. And I was pleased with it. I thought you know, okay, this is this is good. I can, I can have my cycling quality with this. So a couple of months after I finished the app, I went off for a holiday and I went and cycled the New River Seine recycled route from Paris to the coast. And it was brilliant. And literally the first time I used it in a French town, it started seeing turn left along Casey de la Republique way. And I thought, okay, I mean, I know my French is not brilliant, but that is the worst French pronunciation I’ve ever heard. And it’s because the phone has its own native language. And it reads everything out in that. So I spent a whole bunch of time trying to coax the phone, to work out what the native language was for the street name, and to get it to read things out in that. So now if you take the cycle travel app, and you go to France, and it will tell you turn left on then it switches into a French voice plus de la Republique, and so on. So it’s got all of these little tweaks that are meant to give you a more enjoyable cycling experience. A lot of the stuff from the website is also in the app so you can find accommodation, you can switch between the different route types as well. What you can also do in both the app and the website is that you can switch between between different base maps. So cycle travel has its own base map. As I say, I’ve got a bit of a sort of self taught cartography background so I designed something which I thought was appropriate for cycling so it brings in minor roads when you’re zoomed out a lot because that’s the important thing. You can’t see motorways,

Carlton Reid 44:35
so I’m not I’m basically looking at the map here. It’s like all weather motorways. Yes, I can if I if I click it and I can just about see them but they’re not they’re not prominent. Know Exactly,

Richard Fairhurst 44:45
exactly. It’s it’s trying to show you the stuff this is important. A cyclist but you can also choose a bunch of different base maps. So you get a few standard so there’s things like sort of obviously open street Heat Maps standard style, and a few others. But quite quite a lot of these are things that you get as a nice little bonus, nice little bobble, if you’re recycled travel support. So you get Ordnance Survey maps, because everyone loves Ordnance Survey maps, you get the equivalent in other countries. So you get IGN in France, you get things like open cycle map, a bit of satellite mapping all of that. And I find that particularly useful for the Ordnance Survey maps, because if I’m planning off road routes, then OSM doesn’t as yet have completely full coverage of vital ways. And by waste and things like that. It’s getting there, it’s getting much better. But for absolute completeness, you need Ordnance Survey. So I was the other day trying to trace out to the new cycling UK Snowdonia route. And there were a few tracks in that that hadn’t made its way into OpenStreetMap yet, so we’re gonna have a look at Oh, s Oh, yeah, go around the site of this mountain. And through that beautiful restrict an Ordnance Survey

Carlton Reid 45:55
that one of the benefits for tourists, to me as a Roman road geek would be, it tells you all the Roman road stuff. And it tells you this is a church and this is whereas OpenStreetMap, you know, doesn’t doesn’t have bound from it unless there’s a layer. I mean, you can certainly put layers on, but not like something that is there as a default, whereas Ordnance Survey has that benefit. And so but that’s basically what you’re saying is you’ve got it there. Yeah. If you become a supporter, you’ve got it there. And the benefit of the Ordnance Survey is there should you choose to go and get it?

Richard Fairhurst 46:32
Absolutely. And you know, lots of us have grown up with Ordnance Survey maps, they are evocative you, if you’ve spent, you know, your life reading our West maps, you don’t have to read them. They they kind of define the countryside in a lot of ways. And you’re just over to a part of Herefordshire and you look at this, and you can just see the image in your mind. And here we go. We’ve got Wellington marsh and answer bank and 118 foot spot height, metre spot height, that sort of thing. I think yeah, this is the definitive countryside map. And so I like being able to combine cycle travels routing

Carlton Reid 47:03
with so it’s already you’ve sold me, you’ve sold me on your project, how much do I pay

Richard Fairhurst 47:10
as much as you like?

Carlton Reid 47:10
I mean, I think the

Richard Fairhurst 47:12
standard thing that I say here is that you can support it as coffee or cake or beer, which are, you know, three classic cycling foods. And so the equivalent of buying me a coffee every month is two pounds, the equivalent of buying me a slice of cake every month is four pound 50 The equivalent of buying a pint of beer each month, well, you know, I live near Oxford, so it’s very, it’s that sort of thing. And I am, I am 100% comfortable with whatever feels good for you. If you want, if you want to support it for two pounds a month, that is absolutely brilliant. If you’ve had a terrific holiday with cycle travel, and maybe you want to give a bit more for a month or two, that’s fine. But you know, I’m I am honestly honoured by the by what people say about the site and how it has found them to have found good compensates for people. So whatever you feel comfortable with.

Carlton Reid 48:05
So you’re talking about people there. So you have a community on the site. So But basically, it’s not just you contributing advice, information, maybe even brickbat. So tell me about the community aspect of upcycle travel.

Richard Fairhurst 48:24
So I have, for example, a forum on cycle travel, just a substantive web forum where people can give feedback and suggestions. There’s also a place where you can post travelogue so if you’ve been for a ride, and you want to say a bit about it, upload a few photos, then there’s a place for you to do that. And I’m going to be building more on that in the next year. But what I also try and do is engage and support in other forums, other locations. So for example, on the cycling UK forum, there is now I think, 100 Page thread, which is all about cycle travel. And it started off with someone saying, Hey, I’ve just discovered this, and it found me a good route. And then as people have got into it, they have said, okay, yeah, it’s done this, or why did it send me that way? Or Could I could I maybe have this extra feature? So I’ve tried to, you know, interact with the community, wherever they may be, and have it have the app and the site evolve along with that. And to a certain extent now I think, you know, cycle travel is kind of the pet rooting app of the cycling UK forum, for example, because so many people there have said, Oh, this is great, but wouldn’t it be good if he could just do this? I think yeah, okay. I can make it do that. And it is very much meant to be that it’s meant to be something that reflects the way that this sort of this sort of cyclist enjoys riding. I’m not going to start developing stuff for the Strava crowd because it’s not meant to do that. It’s not meant to be about performance or athleticism. I think the Strava for that they do it much better than I ever would. But for tourists and for leisure riders and for people who like quiet routes to cities, all of that, then you know, I try to engage with people get their ideas, because I don’t have a monopoly on good ideas. There’s so much more that you get if you going out talking to people

Carlton Reid 50:17
where you’ve got a new supporter. So how quickly can how easy was that? And while you’re chatting there, the iPhone has done it because all like linked, and I’ve had to go across my bank, and okay, it, but you now have a new monthly supporter, you’ve sold a nice, terrific, thank you. So I will be using it, obviously, I think what you know where it sold me was the Ordnance Survey part. That’s the first example Hang on. You mean I can mean I pay for Ordnance Survey. So I’ve got it on ViewRanger. And so I can do some of what you’re you’re you’re you’re doing that. But it’s got to prove myself. I mean, a lot of the time, I will probably do this myself. So I will just sit there plotting between, you know, the point, I want to go and see it, then I’ll spew that out. And I’ll put it into probably into a into a garden or something. Or in fact to be a beeline, I’ll probably hook it up with a beeline and just send the GPS and then it just sends me that. But then at other times, it’s like, well, I don’t know really where I go. I want somebody to come like hold my hand and show me where to go. So the fact that I can put our lesson as the map that sold me, brilliant. Obviously, I like OpenStreetMap. I love it. But you’re right in what you were saying in that it’s almost that the countryside in a Brit mind is probably a nonland server, it’s certainly a Brit of a certain age is probably ordinances surveys is how you visualise it’s almost when you go abroad as well. Why can’t I have Ordnance Survey everywhere?

Richard Fairhurst 51:56
Oh, I know, I know. And one of the things that I would love to be able to do, and this is sort of, we all have our ambitions, but I would love to be able to make cycle travels own mapping that good for the rest of the world. So that if you are going siting in, particularly the state, the state of mapping in the States is quite, quite something. And you know, I have spent a lot of time trying to fine tune cycle travels, routing in the US because it is a really difficult problem to solve. But yeah, you know, everyone deserves good maps.

Carlton Reid 52:30
Well, there you go, I’ve now I’ve plotted a route where it’s just basically it’s just gone to obviously my home location. And I just switch the map across dead easy. And there is oh, look, there it is, in that that’s that my mind map is literally my mind map is probably a non survey. But you know, if I would then switch across to another map, because you’re not going to use one map, you know, we are we are now we’ve got richness of maps. So you will probably then go that or visualise that as but you wouldn’t use that as turned by turn, whereas OpenStreetMap is better for turn by turn. Yeah, then because it works to a certain scale. And then it gets to a you know, unless you’re you know, you’re getting the the building, you know, version of Ordnance Survey, which you’re not got, you’ve got down to 25,000 They’re having a rather, you don’t go any further than 25,000 That makes no right. You know, you’re 25,000 So you kind of that’s something that is is perfect for a certain visualisation and then I’ll probably switch across. Yeah, absolutely. Um, factual writing, I wouldn’t use it.

Richard Fairhurst 53:33
No, I agree. It’s it’s good as as planning map and then the inspiration map. And it was also it was one of these things is actually getting Ordnance Survey mapping into the iPhone app was stratospherically difficult, because I won’t go too much into the technical aspects of these things. But as you know, Ordnance Survey uses eastings and northings. That’s how a grid reference works. It has this lovely kilometre square grid, pretty much every other map in the rest of the world. I’m simplifying hugely here. But pretty much every other map in the rest of the world uses latitude and longitude. And that means that the mapping software is written to think latitude and longitude. So when you’re trying to shoehorn Ordnance Survey maps into something that was made for OpenStreetMap but style mapping, the amount of maths you have to do to get that to work is colossal. And recycled travel has got you know, probably about 200 lines of code, which is all about doing the conversion to an easting and northing and latitude and longitude. I had to sit down after doing all of that and give myself a bit of a break because it was pretty intense, but it was worth it. Mm hmm.

Carlton Reid 54:44
Well, you now have a new supporter. And I shall be using that

Richard Fairhurst 54:51
pop up on the forum and on cycling UK federal or drop me a line on Twitter and say okay, I’ve started using it. I would like it to do that. is or why doesn’t it do this? Because that’s the feedback that makes it better and I’d love to hear that. Okay, I shall do and in the meantime though,

Carlton Reid 55:07
I’ve been fascinated by your enthusiasm this is absolutely shone through people listening to this world will obviously will understand why they should become a supporter because you clearly incredibly enthusiastic about this. And thank you for talking me through how to use it because that was also eye opening that’s that that was going when I when when you were talking, I then flicked it between when it was on the London to John O’Groats, and then flicked it through to nighttime gravel is like, Oh, well, that’s, that’s quite key. I definitely like the nighttime version. That’s like that’s, that’s really, really sensible. bit of advice, you got there to improve that. But, um, cycle dot travel is obviously where you get the, the website, and then you can go and get the app, etc, including, very soon, as you said, an Android app. How about you, Richard? So where can people find you on social media? And we’ll wrap up with, with with where we can find you on social media.

Richard Fairhurst 56:12
Okay, so on Twitter, I am Richard F. Or there’s also a cycle traveller account, which is cycle underscore travel. There’s cycle travel on Facebook as well. You can search for that. And as I say, I’m I pop up on the various forums, so cycling UK, Reddit, that sort of thing, cycle chat. So you can usually flag me down there and say, hey, get your site to do this. And this is an international podcast. So you have talked about this just a wee bit. But cycletrack This is not a British site, you can do stuff if you are a world traveller. Absolutely. So at the moment it does. Britain and Europe. It does the Northern America. So that’s the US, Canada and Mexico. And it does Australia and New Zealand, I very much adaptive routing to each individual country, that our roads are different the world over. Paths, cycling infrastructure is different the world over. So there are subtly different things in for example, the US routing or the French routing from the British routing. And you can use it to find a route from DAPP to the tip of the boot initially, you can use it to find a route from New York to San Francisco, and people do so have a play around.

Carlton Reid 57:32
Thanks to Richard Fairhurst there. And thanks to you for listening to Episode 337 of the spokesmen podcast brought to you in association with Tern bicycles, show notes at and more can be found at the-spokesmen.com. Episode 338 is a chat with the Chief Operations Officer at bikemap, and it’s available for your downloading pleasure right now. But meanwhile, get out there and ride …

17th July 2023

The Spokesmen Cycling Podcast

EPISODE 335: The Potential for Cargo Bikes

SPONSOR: Tern Bicycles

HOST: Carlton Reid

GUESTS: Patrick Rérat and Virginie Lurkin, HEC Lausanne, at the University of Lausanne

TOPIC: The Potential for Cargo Bikes report

TRANSCRIPT:

Carlton Reid 0:13
Welcome to Episode 335 of the Spokesmen cycling podcast. This show was engineered on Monday 17th of July 2023.

David Bernstein 0:28
The Spokesmen cycling roundtable podcast is brought to you by Tern bicycles. The good people at Tern are committed to building bikes that are useful enough to ride every day and dependable enough to carry the people you love. In other words, they make the kind of bikes that they want to ride. Tern has e-bikes for every type of rider: whether you’re commuting, taking your kids to school or even carrying another adult, visit www.ternbicycles.com. That’s t e r n bicycles.com to learn more.

Carlton Reid 1:02
On today’s show, I’m discussing cargo bikes with a couple of Swiss academics revealing findings from their new study. I’m Carlton Reid and I’m joined by Patrick Rérat and Virginie Lurkin from HEC Lausanne at the University of Lausanne. They are two of the three researchers behind the Potential for Cargo Bikes report. While it’s a Swiss study, it has relevance for other countries. Virginie and Patrick, maybe Virginie first, could you just describe what you do at the University of Lausanne?

Virginie Lurkin 1:41
Yes, sure. So I’m a professor of mainly mobility and logistics. So within the HEC, the Business School of University of Lausanne, and I’m working within the operation department, mainly using quantitative methods to do so.

Carlton Reid 1:58
And and Patrick. So what do you do also at the University of Lausanne,

Patrick Rérat 2:02
So I’m a professor of geography of mobilities and a co director of the OUVEMA (Observatory for Cycling and Active Mobilities) which is the academic observatory for cycling and active mobilities.

Carlton Reid 2:14
And I’ve looked on on either his website and scientific committee of 18, professors geography, history, law, medicine, operation management, political science, psychology, public health, sociology, tourism, and, and even more, because then, etc, there. So that’s an incredible spread of specialities.

Patrick Rérat 2:34
Yeah, we founded the OUVEMA, two, three years ago, and a lot of colleagues were interested in the project. So we aim to foster interdisciplinarity research, and to work together to make all these people work together. And maybe if I can say a few words about the Obama, we are not only a research centre, but we want to be close links with the civil society. We organise webinars, we communicate around our research, we try to co design research project with advocates, for example. Okay,

Carlton Reid 3:10
and it’s would I be right in thinking an awful lot of it is behaviour change. So getting people to actually start to increase their walking and cycling and other active modes?

Patrick Rérat 3:23
Yeah, that has been the main focus. We have other subjects, like policies planning and health, but behaviour change has been the major focus lately, this project on target bikes,

Carlton Reid 3:37
and how much and because walking often gets to be the poor relation in mobility research. So all in just in political discourse, in general, and it’s cycling takes the lion’s share. So how big is walking it compared to cycling in Obama?

Patrick Rérat 4:02
When OUVEMA is a bottom up approach, so it depends also on the people who are part of it. And it depends also on on funding. So now, I would say that the majority of research, address cycling, but we have, for example, a PhD student working on public space and the diversity on public space.

Carlton Reid 4:22
Okay. And I’d like to ask both before we get into the paper you’ve got which is the potential of cargo bikes before we get into that. I would like to ask both of you, I’ll start with Virginie on this one. And that is academics who are involved in something like this, which is almost advocacy you’re almost promoting something and that’s not You’re not being like I’m trying to be very delicate here. So you’re not trying to be a like a dispassionate academic here, even though you’re I’m sure your academic work is, but you’re also partially an advocate. So how do you square that circle of being a researcher? But at the same time, if you’re if you’re trying to affect behaviour change that is advocating for something. How do you how do you meet those two?

Virginie Lurkin 5:15
Interesting question. I think it’s a challenge, right? Because as a researcher, I don’t think the first let’s say mission is to advocate but more to get to model more knowledge, and more insights and solutions to current problems. Being professor and so we third true in transportation, of course, it’s directly related to also society, right. I mean, we, we do research on transportation, and then of course, on how to make it more sustainable given the current challenges that the world is facing. So personally, I think it’s, it’s it if you do good research, and you communicate about it in a way that also it reaches society, then of course, you advocate for it, right. So then there is also I do believe in the power of whole model. So I’m trying as much as possible to, to adopt myself what, what I think helps. But it’s, of course, not always easy. But so I would say this right, by, by talking about it, also trying to have impact in research, and not only academic publications, but also communicate about the topic in the news and so on, I think it helps to advocate.

Carlton Reid 6:39
And Patrick, how do you square that circle?

Patrick Rérat 6:44
Well, I don’t consider myself as an advocate, or as an activist, then, of course, a researcher is not neutral. I mean, if I’m interested in cargo bikes, it’s also because for me, I want you to know, if it’s a it has a nice potential to replace cars, for example. But I think that my role as a researcher is to be rigorous, to be transparent on methods on interpretation, and to make my research available. So that’s how I see the my role and the one of the of the Obama

Carlton Reid 7:27
and those people who are maybe opposed to active mobility, people who maybe want to carry on motoring generally, who then say, activist, academics are not independent. What do you say to them?

Virginie Lurkin 7:47
I mean, for me, I agree with Patrick, right, I don’t think we are supposed to be activist. And if we are, it’s more on a personal choice rather than academics, then I think it’s important to do research on the motivation of people, right? Because it’s only by understanding the motivations, for instance, why some people are not willing to use active active modes, then you can better understand the motivation, and then you can better find solutions even for those people with like appropriate policies, or I mean, I don’t believe that there are people against active mobility, I do believe that there are reasons for some people to prefer, like other modes of transport, and so we need to work on making the right alternatives so that they, they go for like active mobility, but I don’t think it’s like, position as such.

Carlton Reid 8:50
Okay, so your paper here. So the potential cargo bikes, first of all, and it is Switzerland, where that you’ve done this survey of 2000, cargo bike owners and users. But is it applicable elsewhere? Do you think that even though it’s a Swiss study, this would be transferable, some of the findings to other global cities?

Patrick Rérat 9:22
When I think it is because it’s not a high second country like the Netherlands, or Denmark. In Dutch cities and Danish cities, we know that cargo bags have been very popular for a long time. In Switzerland, that’s something new. And we have also very big differences between cities and regions in Switzerland, the French speaking part cycle much less than the German speaking one. So I think that we have an intermediate country for cycling, and which makes this case study Interesting. And maybe another interesting point for Switzerland is that we have cargo bikes owners. But we have also a lot of sharers, with a programme at the national scale, tend to compare both public or users. That’s quite interesting.

Carlton Reid 10:19
So you, in the paper, you talk about how safety is one of the determinants, and one of the things that get more people on bikes and cargo bikes is that the safer it is, the more infrastructure is there more likelihood, people will be on bikes of whatever flavour but going slightly backwards, and what you’ve just said there in that, that the French speaking population uses bikes, less than the German speaking population is that in places where there is the same kind of infrastructure, so it literally is a cultural difference, not a concrete tracks difference.

Patrick Rérat 11:03
It really refers to the, to the condition of the cycling condition, and to safety. We did other research projects, and we could show very big differences in terms of perceived safety between the French speaking part and the German speaking part. And why is it so it’s because in the German part, they have taken measures to come down traffic, like 20 kilometres or 30 kilometres zone much earlier than in the French speaking part. And the same for cycling infrastructure. It’s not the same two cycle in the German part than in the French speaking part. But the French speaking part is trying to catch up. And

Carlton Reid 11:53
in your study, you’ve been basically you’ve interviewed 2000 people, how did you get those 2000 people

Virginie Lurkin 12:01
for the first part on their understanding motivation, profile berries, card bye bike owners and sharers, we have a bit less than 1000. And more than 2000 is for the studies on commercial use, but we got them through different division lists. So some like local biking cycling Association, then our own network also, of course,

Carlton Reid 12:32
did you differentiate between electric cargo bikes and old school non electric cargo bikes? So is there anything in the study that that drill down into that?

Virginie Lurkin 12:43
So we asked them if they had the ebike or normal bike, and it appears that almost 90 percent way like were e-cargo bikes? And I think it is, it is it is an important reason why we see this increase in cargo bikes. It’s also because of their electric assistance.

Carlton Reid 13:06
That’s that’s that’s quite a significant statistic. So basically electrifying, but adding assistance, not not not pure. You know, it’s not a motorbike, but adding some assistance clearly has boosted absolutely boosted the take up of cargo bikes. Yes. Yes,

Virginie Lurkin 13:25
definitely. But especially I think in, in cities, like we have in Switzerland, that you have quite some steep streets, right, this is a quite Montaigne landscape. So. So without electrical assistance, I think there would be some street that you cannot see biking cargo bike with, like children or groceries on it. But I think it’s true. It’s true. Also, for like countries like Netherlands that are more flat countries that definitely the boom can also be explained by the development in electrical assistance.

Carlton Reid 14:04
And then cargo bikes can be and one of the first photographs in your study, in fact, is basically the box bikes, which would carry children and then you have cargo bikes that carry cargo and literally carry goods. So are you differentiating between those two things? Because they’re, you know, they’re very, it’s like a car carrying a children and a van carrying goods. They’re two very, very different things. So how did you differentiate those things?

Patrick Rérat 14:37
Well, for ownership of cargo bike, we have mainly families. So we could say that it’s, it’s a family bike. Almost 80% of the respondent, our families and to carry children is an important motivation for them. To carry children to the kindergarten to the nursery. to go shopping or to go for rides, it’s not only motivations, it’s also actual uses. So, when we speak about owning a cargo bike, it’s really mainly referring to some having a family bike. Then when we have cargo bike sharing, it might be between friends or neighbours, or with a specific programme national programme, or in, in, in a company, it’s more or less frequent use, and more related to carrying bulky items. So it’s true that cargo bags it’s quite, it’s not a normal generous practice, we have a private or company practice, you have own ownership or sharing. Hmm.

Carlton Reid 15:57
And then that clearly strong part of your report and something that is often talked about is how owning a cargo bike or sharing a cargo bike reduces car trips. So you think you’ve measured this and you can you can put a finger on on this as long as the environment is okay.

Virginie Lurkin 16:18
I think it’s important to, to say that, I like that you use the word trips, right? I do think the, the idea is to reduce maybe car trips. So let’s say you have a substitution. But what we have seen, I think, for me, one of the main learning is that the substitution is like to own a second car, for instance. So we have quite some respondents who said that by buying a cargo bag, the ring renounced to the idea of buying a second car or even a first car. So that’s quite interesting. So you, of course, also have substitution effects with the other transport modes, but it has indeed potential to reduce either the ownership of a second car or like buying a new car, or like trips that were made by cars.

Patrick Rérat 17:14
And what is difficult to measure actually, is you have trip substitution. But half of the people, half of the households we interviewed are cash free. So they don’t, they don’t own a car. Maybe some of these households decided to sell their car, some decided not to buy one, and some others could go on living without a car, tend to the cargo bag. So the question is whether easy, but the impact of cargo bag, but the answer is quite complex. What we can say as well is that in our sample, half of the households don’t have a car. And if we have a look at Switzerland, it’s only 21%. And if we have a look at families in Switzerland, it’s only 7% or carefree. So we have hints, but not a quantified answer to that.

Carlton Reid 18:18
And have you drilled into the socio economic backgrounds of cargo bike owners and users because I’m not too sure what it’ll be like in Switzerland, but certainly in the UK and in the big cities in Berlin in the US as well. You know, there’s a perception it might not be reality, but there’s only a perception that somebody certainly carrying children on one of these relatively expensive cargo bikes are going to be relatively rich, probably middle class. And yes, we’ll probably have more than one car sitting back at home. So is Have you done any research on who these people are in socio economic terms?

Virginie Lurkin 19:00
Yes, and it’s true, right? So it’s still mainly young adults age between 30 and 50 Mostly family families and high socio economic status. So I think we got like 80 university graduates which is of course not representative of the entire country, and also more people living in your urban suburban area. So I think this is also the case. But so I agree with the first part of your statement right quite privileged people. But but not for the cars. I it doesn’t seem that it’s like household in which day there was a lot of cars.

Carlton Reid 19:50
So that when when, when a poor family will often own a car. It might take a huge part of their budget, but they will own a car for aspirational More reasons, and they tend not to have a cargo bike, perhaps even for the same reasons in that, you know, they they want the car they don’t want a cargo bike because a cargo bike is seen as a bit. Maybe not, you know something that a working class person would use. But do you need to have, this is not so much in this research here, but just in the future do you need the use of cargo bikes are going to have to broaden out to more social classes, because you can’t just have it, you know, small section of the privileged dotting around on cargo bikes, you want to have lots of people, if we’re going to get rid of if we’re going to reduce car use.

Patrick Rérat 20:41
Yes, but it’s still a new phenomenon. And we launched the survey one year ago, and in one year, a lot of things have changed. For example, the rise of of longtail, I don’t know if it’s popular in other countries, but it’s becoming a big thing here in Switzerland. That’s bi x with a new extended rear rack, and you can have like one or two children on it. And it’s two or three years ago, you couldn’t see a single one on the streets. And now it’s quite popular. So it’s still it’s changing quite quickly. And that’s a challenge. Now we have the pioneers, and we have the early adopters of this innovation, the E cargo bag, and how could we extend this practice to other social groups. And I think that there are several measures, it was interesting to see that 15% of the of the households bought a secondhand cargo bag. So if there is a secondhand market, maybe the price will go down, then we still have a niche product. But if it’s if the market is growing, you will have more shops, maybe you could have also a decrease in prices. cities or municipalities could give subsidy, for example, or sharing can be an option. It’s still quite rare, but you have housing cooperatives, for example. And they have one or two cargo bikes for all their members. And that to me, that may be also an ID to follow. And many

Carlton Reid 22:29
cities have Bike Share cargo bikes now where you can just pick them up off the street, like you can get like a, you know, a normal Velib style bicycle yet I believe but with a cargo rack.

Patrick Rérat 22:44
Just there is such a system in Switzerland, it’s not exactly like Velib. It’s more like rental cars you need to go to, to a shop or to a post office to get the keys or the code. So you can’t have it in the night or in the evening, for example. But this system is quite important because it’s it’s complimentary to cargo bike ownership. It’s not really competition, it’s complimentary. Because you have people, we all need less a cargo bag, or have a more punctual or less frequent use. It’s also a way for some people who are reluctant to buy a cargo bag, which is like more expensive than the usual bag that can give a try. And maybe more symbolically, it’s important also to normalise cargo back. And when you see cargo bags on the street or next to the shop, you go shopping, that’s also important. It’s it gives an idea of a normal thing.

Virginie Lurkin 23:51
But they also agree that it’s like for now it’s still something that not every household can afford, right? I mean, it’s still quite an expensive product. So indeed, if you need to right now choose between the car and a cargo bike, right? You may say, Okay, I really need the car because some of the trips are too far. Why don’t we save currently in terms of infrastructure to have a cargo bike? So I think a lot of efforts will need to be done on making this also a more attractive alternative in terms of infrastructure price. And then I agree with Patrick right then the more of course we will see them the more it will become attracted but there are still things to be done in terms of making this attractive.

Carlton Reid 24:37
Now I recognise that they are expensive, and I recognise the perception is they’re expensive. But when you look at the price of a car, and certainly the how much you spend, even if it’s very cheap car, how much you spend on that car over the air. They are still a fraction of that. So yes, they’re expensive, but they’re nowhere near as expensive as a car. So as a social You know, economic thing, you could, you could certainly save an awful lot of money as a family. If you actually had one of these experiment doing inverted commas here expensive cargo bikes.

Patrick Rérat 25:13
We have the same debate about Ebates. And actually, I think that maybe it’s because we are not a high cycling country. So we still compare ebikes and cargo bags, with usual back. And maybe we should compare it with where the season ticket for buses or trends that we save or that someone save, or what a car or a second car costs. And of course, if you count everything, like not only the price of the car in itself, but also car parking, and all the maintenance and repair, it can go up quite quickly.

Carlton Reid 25:58
Hmm. Now at this point, I’d like to go across to my colleague in the US. Take it away, David.

David Bernstein 26:04
Hello, everyone. This is David from the Fredcast. And of course, the Spokesmen. And I’m here once again to tell you that this podcast is brought to you by Tern bicycles, the good people that Tern build bikes that make it easier for you to replace car trips with bike trips. Part of that is being committed to designing useful bikes that are also fun to ride. But an even greater priority for Tern, is to make sure that your ride is safe, and worryfree. And that’s why Tern works with industry leading third party testing labs like E FB, E, and builds it bikes around Bosch ebike systems, which are UL certified for both electric and fire safety. So before you even zip off on your Tern, fully loaded, and perhaps with the loved one behind, you can be sure that the bike has been tested to handle the extra stresses on the frame, and the rigours of the road. For more information, visit www.ternbicycles.com to learn more. And now, back to the spokesmen.

Carlton Reid 27:13
Thanks, David. And we are back with Patrick and Virginie of the University of Lausanne. And I’d like to ask you both who wants to take this? This is a survey, is this something that you’re going to be doing annually every two years, three years? Is this something you’re going to be continuing. So this is something that will develop over time.

Patrick Rérat 27:34
We don’t have a precise project, but but it would be great to do it like in five years time to see how things have changed. And I’m sure that in five years, a lot of it will increase. And it will be very important, interesting to compare.

Carlton Reid 27:51
And was there a baseline? Was there a previous study that you could say, Well, this has now increased by this much are you the is the first such study that’s been done.

Virginie Lurkin 28:02
Now, it’s actually the first national one here in Switzerland. And in general, this is this is also what what was exciting is that there are very few existing studies on the topic. And it’s still quite some empirical ones, and so on. So I think those are learnings that we got it’s the first one it’s of course an imperfect ones. But I agree with Patrick, it would be really nice to see a bit in five years how things have evolved. And if we see differences,

Patrick Rérat 28:36
the only data we have on cargo bags in Switzerland, that the shapes of E cargo bikes, and it was not even 400 in 2017. And last year, it was more than 4000. So it means that something that was really unusual sides five years ago. Now it’s not usual, I wouldn’t say that, but it’s you don’t turn around your head anymore. If you see a long tail or cargo bag. something exceptional still right but not exceptional. Hmm.

Carlton Reid 29:14
And just putting your your maybe your non scientific hat on here, because I’m gonna be asking you about what you think is gonna happen in the future. But do you think that trajectory that that very steep growth trajectory, do you think that’s going to continue? Or do you think we are bottoming out and it’ll it’ll become less steep in the next five years? So I imagine you’re steady in five years time. If you’ve got one, where do you think you will be?

Virginie Lurkin 29:40
I personally, I hope that it will become way more accessible for many people to have cargo bikes and that we we did well in the substitution effect, right. So but of course, it depends on policymakers on the changes in terms of infrastructure. But I think the weakness is there. Now we need to. Yeah.

Carlton Reid 30:07
So let’s, let’s circle back on that because in the preamble on your report, it does say that the remote the practice remains fragile due to the cycling environment. And you can imagine if you’ve got, you know, two three children in a, you know, Copenhagen box bike, Christiana box bike type thing, you are going to be hyper hyper aware of your surroundings, you know, with with the danger, even perhaps more so than you would as an individual on a bicycle. So clearly, if you’re taking very precious cargo, on the streets, you’re going to be advocating for safer streets. So cargo bikes, actually, and the people who are on them now if they are the privileged class, could that lead to safer streets in the future?

Virginie Lurkin 31:00
Hopefully, I think the safety and infrastructure I mean, we have seen it in the study. But this is something that is already true for a bike or standard bike ride that if you want, if you want to favour the use of bikes, cargo bike ebike, then you need to also make sure that people feel safe. And if you want to see the substitution effect, I also think that it means you need to rethink a bit. How to share the available space right workspace right now is still that there are many streets that are still fully dedicated to two cars while we are trying to reduce. So I think there is a bit of a nonsense there

Patrick Rérat 31:49
is even more an issue when you carry children. I mean, more than 60% of our interviewees said they, they adapt the route when they carry children. And that’s quite a lot. So it shows that everything is far from being perfect. So that’s a limiting factor. At least in now in Switzerland. But it also raises not only the question of, of infrastructure, but of course important. But with cargo bikes, you need also wider infrastructure. Because these cargo bikes will go with regular bags, e bikes, different speed, different size. And there is also something that is less spoken about in the political debate that parking spaces. In many dense or historical neighbourhoods, you don’t really have the space to store your cargo van. And you you hesitate before leaving it’s by at night on the street. So I think that parking spaces is also an important issue.

Carlton Reid 33:12
So bike hangers, you know that you think municipality should be installing secure compounds?

Patrick Rérat 33:19
Yes, something maybe

Carlton Reid 33:21
where car parking spaces were before you can have we’re in the UK, they called bike hangers. And you get

Patrick Rérat 33:29
so that when I was in London a few months ago and tightening that something that is missing in Switzerland, and when you have a cargo bag, you it’s the same also for ebike it has to be easily accessible, but you have also to protect it from theft or weather conditions.

Carlton Reid 33:51
And that the width because the obviously there are very different kinds of cargo bikes out there. So the ones we’ve been talking about so far, like the Christianna. But yeah, as you said they’re wide. But then the long tails are very thin. So they’re they’re each going to have their own a niches and, and and be requirements on the streets, aren’t they?

Patrick Rérat 34:14
Yes, they are different, but they have also some common requirements, like safety, wide cycle lanes. So all these are additional reasons to consider cycling the way when we design streets, for example.

Carlton Reid 34:34
And then the motivations of somebody who are taking children to school or to kindergarten is one thing but then you’ve got the other huge part of cargo bike riding, of course, is the last mile delivery and getting white van man off the streets and so it’s a cargo bike instead of a white van. So what have you discovered on the efficiencies of cargo ebikes compared to say, a big truck, or a van,

Virginie Lurkin 35:06
I mean, urban logistics, you’ll see this more and more right in the discussion that you would replace trucks by other bags because you can access streets that congested and also in terms of cost of emissions and so on. And so the study we did we did was to try to understand the bit, what would be the willingness of young students around here to to pay or to walk to a pickup collection or to pay extra money to be delivered by cargo bikes? And it seems they would be willing to do so. But then, in terms of urban logistics, yeah, I think it’s very interesting debate, because in Switzerland, we still don’t see them very much for urban deliveries, while if you take Paris for instance. They are quite used for deliveries. And so the question becomes also the infrastructure, the landscape. But yeah, the potential for urban Logistics is also of course, quite important. Well, thank

Carlton Reid 36:11
you both very much for talking about your study. Where can people find this study? On online? Where can where can people actually access it?

Patrick Rérat 36:21
It’s on a website of the University of Lausanne. If you Google the potential of cargo bikes, University of Lausanne, you will find it.

Carlton Reid 36:30
Okay, and can you give us your contact details? So anybody who’s listening to this, who wants to either talk to Patrick or individually and they want to contact you either social media or email how do people get in touch with you?

Virginie Lurkin 36:46
Yes, social LinkedIn of course, because when you look on LinkedIn or its viewers, you need that look at you need that ch for the email address.

Carlton Reid 36:56
And Patrick,

Patrick Rérat 36:58
Patrick Rerat. I’m on LinkedIn and Twitter as well and I would happy to connect with other people interested in cargo bikes.

Carlton Reid 37:10
Thanks to Patrick, reread, and Virginie lurking there. And thanks to you for listening to Episode 335 of the spokesman podcast brought to you in association with bicycles, show notes and more can be found at the hyphen spokesman.com Next episode will be out in August. But meanwhile, get out there and ride

10th July 2023

The Spokesmen Cycling Podcast

EPISODE 333: Playing God: Bike Infrastructure Folks at Move Conference

SPONSOR: Tern Bicycles

HOST: Carlton Reid

GUESTS: Philip McAleese, Jon Little, Kris Vanherle, José Manuel Gutiérrez

TOPICS: Bike infrastructure folks recorded at the Move mobility conference in London in June.

• Philip McAleese of Northern Ireland, cofounder of SeeSense the bike lights and data company.
• Jon Little, cofounder of drag-and-drop cityscape imaginator Betastreets.
• Kris Vanherle of citizen traffic counting system Telraam.
• José Gutiérrez of Lane Control of Barcelona, a tool that assesses the safety and attractiveness of cycling infrastructure.

TRANSCRIPT:

Carlton Reid 0:13
Welcome to Episode 333 of the Spokesmen cycling podcast. This show is engineered on Monday 10th of July 2023.

David Bernstein 0:28
The Spokesmen cycling roundtable podcast is brought to you by Tern bicycles. The good people at Tern are committed to building bikes that are useful enough to ride every day and dependable enough to carry the people you love. In other words, they make the kind of bikes that they want to ride. Tern has e bikes for every type of rider; whether you’re commuting, taking your kids to school or even carrying another adult, visit www.ternbicycles.com. That’s t e r n bicycles.com t learn more.

Carlton Reid 1:04
I’m Carlton Reid. And today’s show is a bunch of interviews with bike infrastructure folks who I met at the move mobility conference in London last month. You’ll hear from Philip McAleese of Northern Ireland, cofounder of SeeSense the bike lights and data company. I talk digital trees and more with London’s Jon Little, cofounder of drag and drop cityscape imaginator Betastreets, I also got to meet Telraam’s Kris Van Herle— Telraam is a citizen traffic counting system based out of Belgium and which featured on this podcast a few episodes back. And last but not least there’s José Manuel Gutiérrez of Barcelona who was in London to talk about Lane Control, a tool from the Keita Mobility Factory that assesses the safety and attractiveness of cycling infrastructure.

Have you been here before you interviewed before we came

Philip McAleese 2:10
here last year as well. And so

Carlton Reid 2:11
So you’ve returned? That’s good. Yeah. But Well, shouldn’t you be on a bigger booth now? Because you are you’re not you’re not a startup? It’s a Startup Village. How can we all are you do you want to be in with like the innovators is that

Philip McAleese 2:24
I think we still consider ourselves a startup because there’s still a lot of things that we’re doing, which are very explorative. And you and so you know, we are we are looking to scale. We have a lot of really cool technology. And one of the things that we enjoy doing, but there’s a lot of it is a voyage of discovery. So it’s understanding how people can use our data and insights to really get better understandings make better data, live decisions, to really look at, you know, with the climate of urgency, how do we get more people on sustainable transportation? How do we encourage people and hyper localise nudge behaviour, so it is personal to the individual, so that it means something to them, or will encourage them to keep doing it? Because as I’m sure you know, it takes a few goes that getting people to do something before it can stick in form habits. So how do we break things? First?

Carlton Reid 3:11
Are you data data? I mean data? Are you a data company here? Are you a light company? What What What’s your elec, give me your elevator pitch as though I know nothing about your company fillers.

Philip McAleese 3:23
So we are really a sensor of data company. We specialise in giving insights into micro mobility, helping to understand not only where people are going and how they’re using it, but actually what their experiences where it’s working well. Particular where, what their interaction is like with other road users with the infrastructure, understanding where that’s all working? Well, I’m understanding where it can be improved.

Carlton Reid 3:47
So obviously, you you bicycle lights is where you came from. I’m looking at poster here. And of course, it’s Micromobility. Yes, so you’ve got a bicycle there, but you’ve also got a scooter. So your product, yes. is now going on scooters. Is that in scooters? Or is that still a light that you put attached to the scooter? So what’s what’s the tech?

Philip McAleese 4:06
Yeah, no. So we’ve got two product offerings. One is the consumer lighting. And then obviously, Paris with a mobile phone app to allow people to optionally collect data. The other one is a fleet telematics solution, which uses the same patented sensor technology, but integrated with auto lighting products, so that we can track fleet vehicles. So we’re tracking, obviously, e bikes, regular bikes as well, and E scooters as well. So we’re getting all of the different viewpoints from those different users. One of the projects we’re really brought off at the moment is as its pedal bar, where we’ve got an area of pretty significant deprivation, where we’re helping people to access better opportunities to use bicycles, which are being given to them to access, utility cycling, to get to the shops and so on to access train stations and employments and that’s still in the relatively early phases, but it’s scaling up it’s a really it’s During project, we’re starting to see some infrastructure changes go in for additional bicycle parking drop curbs to allow them to, to access the places they

Carlton Reid 5:08
want to go. And that’s because data showed them.

Philip McAleese 5:11
Yes, exactly that. So we were able to see that, you know, Tuesday evening down the pier was the social place to be, but the some of the local shops that were being used, and people were using them and going places that weren’t expected. So being able to uncover that and understand the sorts of journeys that the bicycles are being used for, has really helped in that design of knowing where to put the infrastructure to improve and continue that good, like behaviour.

Carlton Reid 5:36
So what cities you’re working with.

Philip McAleese 5:38
So we’ve got projects going on at the moment in a number of cities, obviously, our six is the big one. Another one that we’re really proud of is Victoria in sorry, Melbourne and Victoria in Australia. And there we’ve just finished the first phase of a 1000. bicycle lights trial. The that’s what the transport Accident Commission here a government organisation tasked with well, accident condition, transport Accident Commission, that car

Carlton Reid 6:04
accident, yes, in the title. That’s awful. Anyway,

Philip McAleese 6:08
it’s historic. Yeah, okay. But they

Carlton Reid 6:12
Crash not accident. So they should change their name,

Philip McAleese 6:14
yes, but the attack. So they are actually they’ve just paid for an extension to the project. So allow us to engage with the local government authorities, I was selected three or four within that region, to see How could our data help to help them to better understand some of the infrastructure changes they’ve made around how effective they’ve been to look at future infrastructure change? And indeed, is what they’re planning aligned with what the data is actually showing.

Carlton Reid 6:41
Cool? And who are you hoping to talk to hear how you like our meetings planned? Are you just completely random that whoever comes on? What have you set up?

Philip McAleese 6:51
This a little bit of everything. So we’re obviously very, very much interested in here to learn. So there are a number of incredibly fascinating talks and presentations, and so on that we want to go and see. There are a lot of contacts of projects, I think we’ve been quite conscious of our carbon footprint, where, you know, we like having some meetings with people. We haven’t travelled backwards and forwards in Belfast to the UK as much as we would have done historically. And so it’s actually wonderful to come here and meet a lot of our customers and clients and people that we know, and see them face to face, but in a very effective and carbon, low carbon way. So partly for presentations, partly to meet people, and of course, for networking to see are there other opportunities for us to sell our technology and to help people have better insights.

Carlton Reid 7:34
Philip McAleese has been on the show before, and so has the next person that I interviewed at move, and that is Jon Little. And Jon is kind of a tree fan, you’ll kind of find out why in a second. But he was extolling the virtues of trees on this show, way back in 2018. So that was episode 195, in which I entitled “cycle advocates should ask for trees, not just cycleways.” So here’s the up to date, Jon, at the Move conference. And of course, we did start by talking about trees.

Isn’t this as though

Jon Little 8:11
there are lots of trees in it? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the plants and stuff are actually my favourite part of it. To be perfectly honest, we’re but

Carlton Reid 8:17
so first of all, tell us who you are for the tape yet. Jon, who are you, Jon? So

Jon Little 8:21
my name is Jon Little. I’m a transport consultant. I work in street design, generally, but particularly kind of interested in getting people involved in the code design process, realise how important that is. And basically how a picture is worth 1000 words. It’s never truer than kind of what we’re up to at the moment in trying to show people that change is possible and actually that the world won’t stop spinning.

Carlton Reid 8:43
So this is betta. So drinking seats. Yeah. So it’s kind of like a riff on better and better and betta.

Jon Little 8:49
Absolutely. Yeah. So it’s a street design visualisation tool we built from the ground up during lockdown. Primarily because I do my day job has been asked by so many local authorities. Can we do this down here? What would that look like if I kept thinking self if only we had a tool where we could just take a photo and drag and drop stuff in and create this vision of mainly a meme got me more useful. So of course, how it could look in the end with a full blown visualisation, which I think is fair to say lots of people unfortunately, when they saw trees in pots couldn’t necessarily see what the end result might look like in a few years time and can’t buy into the halfway house as such. So we built a tool that enables you to create visualisations in a matter of minutes that look the same as a visualisation that would have been made by UK transport consultancy costing 1000s of pounds and taking lots and lots of hours of engineers and people involved in that process.

Carlton Reid 9:37
And it’s using Google Streetview

Jon Little 9:39
now so we we tried to tell people not to street although you can do that’s up to you. We prefer that people don’t use Google imagery at the moment we recommend that you don’t just purely because Google don’t like people drawing on their images but effectively it’s any any photo you take the mobile or or an SLR you import into our browser. And then you set the scale set the horizon And, and that’s about it. And then everything that you drag and drop from the library of things, which is all real things provided by real providers. So kerbs from char con or Felco cycle hangers or whatever that might be. You then drag and drop to stuff of your choice into your image and recreate the vision of how that street or place could look. It’s got every single TSR DD sign and the pro version line markings and everything else, all the standard stuff you need to do highway maintenance, not just beautiful streets, but you can use visualisation or use our tool to help people understand how it look, if you just resurface the road. Of course, you’d never normally do that with visualisation tool because it costs 1000s of pounds. And there just isn’t that money or that inclination to necessarily do that normally. We like to think that we’ve invented something or made something that can change the way that visualisation is used in our industry. And actually the way our industry works with people, be it in in the office or out the office, and particularly around the courts having those conversations about how places might look if change happens, and hopefully it will be a good thing.

Carlton Reid 10:59
And when as you there was like a rolling demo that was going on where you weren’t having to press thing. Yeah, there was the Photoshop. Like regenitive thing. Basically, it took a car out of the picture. Yeah, it was quite cute. So you’re basically not just adding stuff. You’re taking stuff

away. Yeah, you can play god.

Jon Little 11:17
Absolutely. So we’ve we’ve we’ve got an image object removal tool within our within our platform, it enables you to remove pretty much anything from the image. I mean, it’s machine learning, it’s not perfect. It’s akin to like similar to some of the smartphones have gotten now. But yeah, the idea being that if there’s a car in a place where you don’t want it and you want to and that would otherwise mean that you couldn’t do the visual without going to Photoshop or something else. So you can remove it. But as you can see, it can easily as easily remove a line marker off the street.

Carlton Reid 11:43
Yep. Yep. And how much is this going to cost? authority so

Jon Little 11:48
it’s 900 pounds a year. For licence that licence can be floating between the team only one person can use at any one time. So obviously, we like to think that that teams will need more than one licence to be perfectly honest with you because actually, as you can see, you can use visualisation for just seeing what it looked like if you dropped a tree in an empty tree pit and not necessarily doing a full blown visualisation, as we’re kind of accustomed to with big developments and big road projects.

Carlton Reid 12:13
So the demo we’re getting now is of a tree being put in is that what particular kind of tree

Jon Little 12:17
though now you’re testing my knowledge I sorry, man. I’m not education as well. I know that’s a shocker, isn’t it? But um, but this

Carlton Reid 12:25
is your favourite thing you like basically the last time you were on the show many many years ago you were basically saying that the biggest thing that we could improve cities get more people walking, cycling and not driving bizarrely, is those green things with brown bits underneath.

Jon Little 12:43
Yeah, absolutely. And actually in the background of that image is his street art and the like. I mean, people like we know from you know, Lucy Saunders healthy street stuff from from lots of evidence based stuff that we use in our industry, we know that people feel safer, they more likely to walk and cycle and be outside if they feel like it’s a place that they belong for one of a better phrase, and of course, beautify and streets and add implant and and stuff as Andy stone at the moment. Couldn’t be part of that process. Again, we we like to think because we’ve designed so we talk we pay lip service, I think in some times in our industry to we’re going to design this street for eight to 18 year olds, and it’s going to be for everybody and all that stuff. And of course that’s right, but we don’t actually involve all those people in the process, particularly children whereas I mean, my daughter talks about this as being my game so that you can upload your game please. He loves placing trees in the Olympic Park and adding stuff where it should be on our on our route school. We like to think there again on a community centre on a Wednesday night when actually people might be getting frustrated so can’t get as involved in the design process they’d like to this tool brings all those barriers down you don’t need a massive load of experienced software to use this you don’t need a civil engineering degree we think with roughly about half an hour an hour playing around here as a competent

Carlton Reid 13:49
you’re you’re playing God your You’re certainly playing Monty Don there because what he’s been basically planting the street with grasses first as possible soils and obviously, and then you put daisies in and all that. And it’s like already looks really cute. You’ve taken a what’s a pretty boring industrial stroke scene and you’ve instantly made it nice. And that took what about 25 seconds? Probably from start to finish. Yeah. And then can you like do instant LTNs. So you’ve got like planter boxes of you?

Jon Little 14:23
Absolutely. These are all like, plugged in. Yeah.

So you can pick a plant from the library things you can then actually decide what plants go in it so you can put the plant down and then and then plant it yourself. I mean, we’ve got we’ve got curbs we’ve got kind of all your standard highway materials in there, but also cause lots of stuff to make streets look nicer.

Carlton Reid 14:41
So now you’re saying this is for local authorities and one person to do it. But would this not be something maybe you’ve absolutely envisage this and I’m not saying anything that you haven’t already thought of is getting people in and playing on you as a founder of your street. Yep. And people will naturally even though if you went in and say do you want, what do you want? They wouldn’t tell you what they want all the cars riddle, but if they actually physically played with it, so I’d actually quite like some flowers. Yeah, absolutely. And then all of a sudden you say what? You drawn them a Yep. So that’s what is this?

Jon Little 15:15
Absolutely. So we hope that rather than people having a kind of philosophical, do you want this thing? Yes or No, actually, you can have a design competition where everyone’s doing their own versions of the plant and at the end of their street and saying, Oh, I like his idea. I like that tree. I like that bit. And maybe collaboratively, truly collaboratively come up with a solution for whatever it might be. You can also actually, there’s no reason why you can’t put a half created street designing so say for argument’s sake, an engineer does put in the two metre wide footway, the new cycletrack and then get people to colour in the rest of the drawing. So they pick the plant and they pick the optional extras, they decide where the parklets go and all the rest of it to again, hopefully open up that design process. So it truly is CO design.

Carlton Reid 15:53
So you’re making it more beautiful there now with planting and nice things, but just as easily if you’re a motor centric traffic engineer, you could put loads of Yes, city stuff. Absolutely. I mean, this can be used for bad yet as well as

Jon Little 16:08
absolutely, you know, dare I say you can think about putting a road through a park if you say wish as easily as you can, you know, turn in a street into a park,

Carlton Reid 16:15
which reminds me because there’s a an A to Zed of Liverpool, where they’re going to put a road through a park. And it’s not it doesn’t come forward. You don’t think about it too much. Until he said put it on anything. Jesus, they really are putting a road through a park. Yeah. And it’s when you visualise it on a map when it brings it home. Yeah. So these kinds of things can bring these things home.

Jon Little 16:40
Yeah, absolutely.

And we’ve had, you know, we’ve had lots of interest from temporary, sort of music festivals and things and think about can we show people how it will temporarily look, if we put an entrance into this farmer’s field to do the carpark? Well, of course you can. Similarly, you know, parks, we’ve had somebody from the United Nations talk about whether they could use it to plan temporary road to conflict zones, or I mean, fundamentally, you can use anything you can take a photo of, you can upload to our platform and then play away.

Carlton Reid 17:04
So you’re saying it international there. But this isn’t British? Because it’s got all the British roads? Yeah. So have you got an international version?

Jon Little 17:12
on the roadmap? Yes, certainly, we’ve had quite a bit of interests from Ireland, we’ve got a bit of a fan club in Prague, we’ve added some life purpose, paving patents and semicircle. Paving patents are quite widespread in Prague purely because we’ve got quite a few users there of the demo, certainly, we hope that they’re going to start using the pro version. But the idea is absolutely that our next step is more traffic management stuff, more more standard street design stuff into the library, but then also thinking about a, you know, Dutch library of French library and the road signs and the light just as much as you know, Dutch entry curves and the like. But the idea being that there are different versions for different countries to

Carlton Reid 17:46
Yeah. And so what stage you out with with physically selling there

Jon Little 17:49
So we’re basically getting ready for Rio. So

we’ve so we’ve just relaunched our website, is literally at the moment of us switching over to have a fully constrained compatible purchasable website where you can affect the download, like by your own subscription version straight from there, there will always be a free demo, we believe in that. We believe we’ve created something for the power of goods, you said earlier about putting road to carpet and free parks. Of course you can, but we like to think that most people are going to use it for the right thing. And we actually want everyone to always have a version available for nothing too bad to do a bit with it. But then of course, if they want to go big, they need to subscribe and get the wider product like

Carlton Reid 18:24
an electric shock. You know, if you put a road in? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay. So 900 pounds for local authority. Yeah. Or you can envisage a member of the public doing this is there like a subscription model.

Jon Little 18:38
So there’s a free version for anybody. And that’s got a very limited library of things, it has to be said compared to the full blown pro version. Local authorities can purchase the version and open it up to residents to have a play around as part of the design process. But primarily, the the end user subscription version is aimed at people who work in the industry be that in consultancies or local authorities or, or even suppliers of stuff. So we’re actually working with a few of our providers to build them versions, they can use a sale tool, because of course, they can stand there with a prospective local authority client and show them how it look if you put a row of their curb defendants down the road or wherever it might be.

Carlton Reid 19:13
Jon, people who are going to be interested in this where can they find out more information?

Jon Little 19:17
so go on to a website betastreets.co.uk. You can find that the demo there, you can sign up for the free version. You’ll find details about those subscriptions to the Pro versions. We’re on Twitter at BT streets limited BTA streets limited. And yeah, and that’s that’s kind of our profile at the moment. We’re on Instagram, too. But we’re not as prolific on that. As we said at the moment. There’s too many things for

Carlton Reid 19:39
but you’re very visual.

Jon Little 19:41
Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, so we’ve got, we’ve got for users, we’re building an academy in the background, that’s going to be a place where people can share tips and videos of how to Andy’s gonna have lots of videos him using it showing how to create you know how to pop up the shadows and kind of really finish off your images, but we like to think that’s gonna end up being a peer to peer space where people are going to love from each other and share best practice to, we encourage everyone to when they create beautiful images to share them as best they can with everyone else. That’s gonna go wild on social media. Yeah, we like to think so I mean, the London Cycling campaign at an earlier version of it last year in the lead up to the elections, and that went really well. I mean, they use it’s quite the climate Safe Streets campaign. Of course, the visuals that they created, were really powerful in showing prospective politicians. You know, if you like this, I’ll vote for you. If if you vote for this type thing, which I think you know, by all accounts worked really well. Yeah, we know. I mean, obviously, I said earlier, it’s the power of, you know, an image being worth 1000 words. And yeah, I mean, we hope as I say that people grab it and do beautiful things with it.

Carlton Reid 20:42
Before the next two guests, here’s a quick commercial interlude with my colleague, David.

David Bernstein 20:48
Hello, everyone. This is David from the Fredcast. And of course, the spokesmen. And I’m here once again to tell you that this podcast is brought to you by Tern bicycles, the good people at Tern build bikes that make it easier for you to replace car trips with bike trips. Part of that is being committed to designing useful bikes that are also fun to ride. But an even greater priority for turn, is to make sure that your ride is safe, and worryfree. And that’s why turn works with industry leading third party testing labs like E FB, E, and builds it bikes around Bosch ebike systems which are UL certified for both electric and fire safety. So before you even zip off on your Tern, fully loaded, and perhaps with a loved one behind, you can be sure that the bike has been tested to handle the extra stresses on the frame, and the rigours of the road. For more information visit www.ternbicycles.com to learn more. And now back to the spokesmen.

Carlton Reid 21:58
Thanks, David. And we are back with bike infrastructure folks I met at move at Excel in London. I got to the show from Newcastle on LNER on the East Coast Main Line and then rode to Docklands on a folding bike. Kris Vanherle of Telraam also came on the train. How did you get here because this is a mobility conference, you’ve got to use micro mobility you’ve got to use the bicycle. You say anything else and you’re you’re drummed out, move on.

Kris Vanherle 22:32
I’ll explain the whole story. So I live very close at the train station in Leurven. So that’s like five minute walk even less. So I take a train to Brussels Midi station, you’ll start to Kings Cross and I walked across to I don’t know the connecting rail. One stop at Farrington and then Elizabeth line until here and that’s it.

Carlton Reid 22:55
Kings Cross today? That was pretty good. So we’re both travelled long distances. today. Yeah. So we have talked before Yes. Even on the on the podcast. But why are you here? Why is telraam here? And how do you find out about move?

Kris Vanherle 23:11
All right, well, first of all found out but move. And we’ve been stalled a bit by by industry or people or people who knew about trafficking, you should be here, so close about new stuff on mobility. And yeah, obviously we are new. So I think we should have our place here where technology meets the centres for policy or anything which is going to get to traffic so

Carlton Reid 23:36
I can’t explain where we are because we are in the startup it’s the lots of expensive booths out there. I’m not saying that you know inexpensive booths, I’m sure they they charge you and I’m gonna lay however, we are smaller you are like you know, your elevator pitch is basically smaller than an elevator, you’ve got like a small but this is an I was fine that here is the most interesting companies anyway, not nothing against the big companies, but their corporates have been going for a long time. It’s the smaller guys who are the ones you know, innovating, which I like to come and talk about, come and talk to so you think you’re gonna get who here who are you gonna be talking to?

Kris Vanherle 24:13
There’s a few people we know that will stop by so from Oxfordshire, I think for sure. And we known as a couple more languages is joining as well. So it’s good to finally meet them in person. So that’s, that’s interesting. And I don’t know, who knows. I mean, we don’t just don’t only want to work for local authorities, but also any mobility professional who might work with the data or want to be sent to deployment doing counts. So there’s there’s I guess there’s plenty of talks to be had today.

Carlton Reid 24:44
So I’m still waiting to do my Forbes piece. Yeah, I used it very successfully to measure the pedestrians and cyclists and motorists on my my road and I thought it was absolutely brilliant for that and it went viral at times. To You know, people are really fascinated in this. So hopefully people will will now recognise you a bit more when they come to you. But what do you actually physically doing here? So what, what how you enticing them cuz I can see you’ve got something and you are gonna be Have you seen this yet I’ve never used to describe what this is

Kris Vanherle 25:20
okay, so this is a this is a demonstrate how Telraam works in the field. So we’ve got a backboard of a typical cityscape, let’s say, which is then standing up like this, there’s a street in front, like this. And we’ll simulate a window here. Now there’s two devices connected. So one is the dahlia which I’ll connect later on has to be that one. And then there’s a video, which is basically showing you what Telly I’m seeing. So you can see how cars passed by and you can see telecom counter picking up and you can see how telecom is counting done. So with the bounding boxes, so it’s just a technology demonstrator and see how it works in the field, basically. And we work obviously, with all kinds of fun stuff like this. Trucks. Bikes, we have to sort this out, because this is the beautiful, but we’ll we’ll sorted and also a fire truck. So we’ll just be driving by it to to show how thallium device how it works. That’s it,

Carlton Reid 26:29
I guess, when people just kind of know that counting is really, really important. And counting of pedestrians and cyclists is tends to be way down the list

in the priority list, it’s easier to just, you know,

monitor cars with your pneumatic tubes and stuff. So the tech that you’ve got here isn’t pneumatic tubes, and it’s using AI. And it’s counting people. And that’s important for cities and certainly important. And I got a huge shock. On my road. I was new, there’s lots of people using it, active travel, but to actually see it in numbers and to see how much more than motorists was like, incredible. Exactly. And very valuable data. Yep. So you are producing basically very valuable data.

Kris Vanherle 27:14
Yeah, yeah, that’s it. I mean, the I think the capitalism tries to fill us two things. So the non car modes because there’s technology to monitor and uncovers, but it’s either very expensive or very limited. And then on the on the smaller roads, which are often neglected. So there’s there’s plenty of counting on Main artists, which is needed, because you need to mark congestion zone, but it’s always the small residential roads, whichever got running, for example, which never get counted. So you need to have something cheap and which is affordable, no cheap, affordable to do allow for a more dense, ethical thing. Network. That’s what we’re aiming for.

Carlton Reid 27:53
And finally, here’s Jose Gutierrez of Barcelona, talking about Lane Patrol.

Jose Gutierrez 27:59
So I’m Jose Gutierrez, I’m representing Lane Patrol. We are actually in some sort of incubator internal incubator where a mobility company called fracture consulting based in Barcelona, and we’ve been working with this project, we brought up this a software solution, that it’s called Lane patrol that consists of two things, one it like hardware on the other side is software, what we do is to analyse the infrastructure safety of cycle routes, for all we get, we are actually leveraging being trusted suppliers of a IRAP, which is the international road assessment programme. I’m their methodology called Cycra.

Carlton Reid 28:36
And you’re doing this for cameras. What’s What’s this,

Jose Gutierrez 28:38
so what we do is that we have a device or we also have a mobile app where we collect frames of video or images that we then use to evaluate over 40 attributes. To assess the safety of the cycle routes, where these attributes, we get actually the rating based on the methodology of the safety of these damn intersections. And we get the conflicts in the cycle route conflicts of vehicles with other conflicts of bicycles, with the bicycles, bicycles, with objects, bicycles, with pedestrians and bicycles with vehicles

Carlton Reid 29:11
and technology technology that you use or is this anybody can use it and they feed the information to you,

Jose Gutierrez 29:18
or at least actually, anyone can use it, but we need to supervise it because for the methodology, we need to have this we’re a trusted supplier. So actually, we need to understand the methodology we need to do quality review of the work. So it is the solution is either for other consultants or for cities who wants to analyse it and create probably an investment and or a maintenance plan of the cycle routes. So this is this is starting off with let’s say the end user we could what we do is that we collaborate with consultants in other countries, or we go directly to municipalities or decision makers in regions, but actually they want to say okay, you know what, we have a 200 kilometre network we want to analyse, where should we invest first either where we have more bicyclists and these bicyclists are in the red zones of safety. Or you can just want to make sure that all your network gets to a certain level of safety. So this is this is what we did. We are working. We have now a project we’re part of a European funded project called Mollier. We are analysing cycleway that is connecting Barcelona to neighbouring towns. We’re in our bigger project together with people from my rap from cycle rap in which we are in analysing and typology of cycle routes in Madrid and Barcelona. But there’s also their partners working in Bogota, Sao Paulo and Fayetteville in the US. So there’s a big project that we’re currently ongoing.

Carlton Reid 30:38
And I’m presuming it’s on a bicycle.

Jose Gutierrez 30:41
It is on a bicycle.

Carlton Reid 30:42
Do you have pictures?

Describe this or show me pictures? Looks like?

Jose Gutierrez 30:47
Yes. Well? Well, basically, it’s like, I was just opening my computer. Let me see. I don’t have

Carlton Reid 30:55
he’s coming. The guy who draws that he’s coming. How easy he’s coming to Yes. Well, I’m meeting him later on.

Jose Gutierrez 30:59
Oh, I’m gonna look for him. Because I know there’s a new cartoon that I want to say.

Carlton Reid 31:04
I’ll send him

your way.

Jose Gutierrez 31:05
Oh, yeah. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect.

Carlton Reid 31:07
I’ll just jump in here to explain that Jose had an illustration on his laptop drawn by Dave Walker. And I introduced the two later on, because Dave was also at the show, in fact, on on one of my free tickets anyway, Dave is on the next show.

So for now, we have this little device

where I’m going to describe this. So that’s basically a box a big grey box that you attach to the handlebars.

Jose Gutierrez 31:33
Yeah, exactly.

Carlton Reid 31:33
And that’s, that’s more than just a camera. So there’s an accelerometers in there.

Jose Gutierrez 31:38
Exactly.

Carlton Reid 31:39
Is it doing surface roughness?

Jose Gutierrez 31:41
Yeah,

Carlton Reid 31:41
is it doing the vibrations it is

Jose Gutierrez 31:43
It has some he has some, some sensors, we’re actually adding more, or the moment we’re working on this device, we’re improving it. So this is, let’s say version one of the device. And at the same time, we have the mobile app that is doing the same thing for now in the mobile in the mobile phone, on the phone. So our idea is to offer now we have actually, we’ve been working on this a little bit less than a year. So our idea is to use a mobile app now. Then start using the device to avoid having a super extensive AI model to analyse the attributes.

Carlton Reid 32:14
So my next question is we must be AI in here somewhere that’s analysing this afterwards. That’s good. Okay,

Jose Gutierrez 32:20
we’re now we’re doing both AI work and manual work to do this. Imagine like, over 40 attributes, every 10 intersections, so there is a lot of coding to be done. So we are using AI to save the time. So

Carlton Reid 32:30
give me so it’s it’s junctions. It’s number of pedestrian pedestrian interactions. What? Yeah, more of the 41 of the

Jose Gutierrez 32:40
Yeah, yeah. So some of them is the width, the width of the cycling, the roughness of the surface, if there’s curvature, if there’s this low, here, there’s adjacent lanes of vehicles. There’s what type of facility it is, if it’s off road or on the road, yeah, over 40 Art units,

Carlton Reid 32:58
and then the city gets an overall score. Exactly. And then there’s like red spots or hotspots and you must go and fix this bit. That is why the AI says is that it is

Jose Gutierrez 33:10
a little bit project based. So you can either analyse the whole network, as you mentioned, or you can analyse one specific route with this a couple of tunnels, for example. So we want to check, what is the safety or what what attributes can be changed in that in those tunnels, we’ll make sure that we can improve them to we can improve the safety of them. So it is project based, but yeah, the typical will be analysing the whole network and make it a maintenance plan or an investment plan for the cycle routes.

Carlton Reid 33:33
And if you envisage this technology being used by people in one city, or people we’re going to be going, who’s basically doing this, which is one company doing this, are you selling the technology, so lots of people can do this?

Jose Gutierrez 33:52
Yeah. So while we envision is to have partners during this, and using both leveraging our knowledge, and being part of the methodology, and also using the technology to do them themselves. So I guess

Carlton Reid 34:03
the question there was, there’s a long way of saying I’m sorry, what is Yeah,

are you selling the box or the service? The service? Okay, so so that that

was that was difficult.

Jose Gutierrez 34:12
I’m looking for partners, probably in other parts of the world, right? But this can be that’s a good thing. This is an easy and cheap way to analyse the safety of cycle routes. Okay,

Carlton Reid 34:22
so this is gonna be for a podcast. So tell me where people can get more information on lane patrol.

Jose Gutierrez 34:29
Yeah, so you can you can look for us and Keita dot mobi so Keita ke ita dot m o b i You can email me at Jose dot Gutierrez at Gator dot moving on. We’re soon to launch our limpets or website. So we’re about to do that will be Lane patrol.com dot it’s coming soon.

Carlton Reid 34:56
Thanks to all of my guests today there and thanks to you for listening to episode 333 of the Spokesmen podcast, brought to you in association with Tern Bicycles. Show notes and more can be found at the-spokesmen.com. The next episode will be out soon and will be a whole bunch more interviews recorded at the Move conference including cartoonist Dave Walker, a bamboo bike company from Portugal, bike mechanic folks from Fettle, Alex from Flit bike and Xavier, the CEO of Sustrans. There will also be extracts from a chat I had with Henri Moissingiac recorded from Move’s main stage but meanwhile get out there and ride.