@WorksInPrint @RTaylorUK Your research on the different cycle-route planners was used in the local cross-party debate yesterday! as e.g. of govt. waste.

http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/waste/2010/04/million-wasted-on-cycle-route-plans-1.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/12/cycle_route_planner/

Other coverage includes:
http://www.bikeradar.com/news/article/millions-wasted-on-online-cycle-route-planner-25693
http://www.techeye.net/internet/department-for-transport-wastes-3-million-on-cycle-route-planner

We have published our own views on this:

http://www.cyclestreets.net/blog/2010/04/08/foi-response-our-views/

which may be of interest.

Receive contract alert emails – get the latest contracts delivered from as little as 19p each day!

You’ve got to subscribe to get anything useful out of it - which isn’t Government getting letting the information get out there to the people who could offer massive savings to the taxpayer.

Making public sector procurement work in an open and transparent manner could save so much more than the subscription fees suply2gov can raise, those in government are simply doing it wrong. The whole approach and tone is wrong.

How many public bodies have Pre-Qualification questionnaires that don’t filter out all companies which don’t have staff? I’d like to bet CycleStreets doesn’t have staff, and a huge number of successful businesses operating in IT and other “knowledge industries” don’t either.

As an aside - it would help if we had a government which made it easier to employ people and more companies operated in this manner would grow; but all parties are focused on gimmicks which help tiny numbers of enterprises rather than revolutionising regulation to cope with the future.

http://www.publictenders.net/tenders/archive/104767

The format in which data is being collected is specified (with examples) at:

http://www.dft.gov.uk/cyclenetxchange/

Low value tenders are also published openly - e.g http://www.supply2.gov.uk (and elsewhere - typically by individual bodies). Government has every reason to try and encourage smaller suppliers to participate, but they don’t always do this in a very useful way.

As you say, it’s not really an advertising problem. And (back to my original point) neither the blame, or the solution, lies entirely on government’s side.

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2006/20060005.htm#8

It is not the case that commercial services only filter, they also cover tenders which fall below the thresholds - those which may well be of more interest to smaller businesses or other enterprises. I think the existence of a niche here in which the commercial services can operate indicate a failing in the public sector approach.

Public advertising isn’t sufficient alone to enable greater use of companies other than enormous consultancies which specialise in making profit out of public sector spending.

At the moment there’s a bizarre arrangement where people wanting to say informed about public sector tenders have to sign up alerts from private companies as the government is so poor at publishing information themselves.

There are often utterly crazy requirements which are out of line with the companies act and other legislation for those wishing to supply to government. Sometimes there are also completely inappropriate requirements for insurances which companies wouldn’t otherwise have to hold.

In terms of the cycle data collection; the key issues are i/ is it being shared now it has been collected ii/ why did it need to be collected in the first place.

In terms of why it needed to be specifically collected - surely for example there are a number of sources of information on route gradients - so why resurvey those.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to question why the Department of Transport was focusing on trying to make a user-focused website at all given the existence of CycleStreets and having considered the potential for Google to produce a free offering too.

But I’m uncomfortable about rushing to allocate all the blame to the DfT.

They did openly advertise their requirement for cycle data back in May 2009. As they are obliged to do. They received a number of different tenders in response to each part of the contract, from which they picked their preferred suppliers. As they are obliged to do.

They surely have to open these things to competition. It would have been nice if they had spread a bit more awareness around beforehand, but anyone interested in working on this kind of project needs do use their antennae as well. If things like this are going to work better in future then it needs some matching process - with responsibilities on both sides.

Oh, and a quick “hello” from a fellow ex-Imperial ex-GardenHall-er!

The journey planner database holds Ordnance Survey ITN data from November 2007. This is currently being brought up-to-date by Atkins.

This raises the question of if this publicly funded update has been appropriately shared.

In the minutes of the same board meeting there is evidence Transport Direct briefly considered working with CycleStreets and copying one of CycleStreets’ key features - responding to user suggestions.

NI noted user generated data is a good way to create subjective cycle data. Whether this could be provided through existing websites or services such as cyclestreets.net was discussed. The board agreed that more thought was required and this would be discussed at the next board meeting.

If your CycleStreets journey suggestion is unexpected in some way you can submit feedback and if they can they’ll fix the problem - perhaps by updating Open Street Map to include a missing feature. As one of the previous comments suggests this is pretty important with respect to cycle routes as the “network” is so locally fiddly and detailed. It appears this suggestion by the civil servant known only as “NI” wasn’t followed up at the subsequent board meeting.

Figures are Ex. VAT
Source (PDF)

As a quick `click test’ I wondered if the DoT could suggest improvements to my weekend Cambridge / London cycle only to be told that this journey was too far to be planned. Seriously, WTF?

Not only do I have to confirm that I mean Cambridge, Cambs and NOT Cambridge, Gloucestershire but ALSO London (GREATER LONDON) not London (Little London). And as for the URL pah!

If the money was spent on the ground we wouldn’t need the maps?

And another thing: I’ve just planned a cycle journey in Cambridge on Transport Direct and it’s trying to send me the wrong way up a one-way street. (It evidently thinks that Catharine Street is two-way all the way from the Co-op up to St Philip’s Road, rather than just to the Co-op car park.) I’m guessing this could be because their links are tied to OS TOIDs, which will exist at junctions but not often elsewhere. Understandably, perhaps, they mightn’t want to introduce new nodes otherwise the network will get out of sync with the ITN. I’ve not read through the FoI papers yet but this seems like a flawed design: I would guess that the cycle network is full of all sorts of oddities like this.