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Under the hood

Our maps are made using open data from OpenStreetMap, licensed under the Open Database Licence; with additional elevation data from Sonny, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; additional UK data from Ordnance Survey and the Department for Transport, licensed under the Open Government Licence (© Crown copyright and database right); additional US data from federal and state sources; additional French data from départements under Licence Ouverte and the Open Database Licence; additional Canadian data from StatCan (Geography Division, Statistics Canada); additional Australian data from the governments of NSW, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Victoria under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

Help improve these maps!

OpenStreetMap is made by people like you. If a cycle path, road, pub or café is missing, just head in and add it. It’ll then be available to thousands of other cyclists using cycle.travel, OpenCycleMap, CycleStreets, Sustrans’ printed maps and many other projects: we all take the same data and add our own spin to it.

Here at cycle.travel we’ve supported OpenStreetMap since its first months back in 2004; we’ve mapped countless miles of cycle routes and contributed a lot of the code that’s been used in the project over the years.

How cycle.travel uses OSM data

We aim to take updates from OpenStreetMap every month or so: it then takes around three days to do all the calculations to find the best routes.

We do a lot of processing work to make the raw OSM map as useful as possible for cyclists (several thousand lines of code!). If you’re editing OSM, here are some of the things to keep in mind:

We also use Ordnance Survey data for UK built-up areas, Corine data for European built-up areas, and government open data for North America. We use both Ordnance Survey and NASA data for elevation.

If you find something missing or misleading in our maps and directions, head over to OpenStreetMap to fix it. But if OSM’s right, and cycle.travel isn’t doing what you’d expect with the data, we want to know. Post in the cycle.travel site forum and let us know what you think.