A Diagram to map them all!

The deployment of cycling facilities had already significantly accelerated in late 2019 (perhaps due to approaching municipal elections?), but the (first) lockdown in May truly amplified the phenomenon. Everywhere in France, new cycling facilities sprouted to meet the needs of an ever-growing community of cyclists and to facilitate the conversion to cycling for as many people as possible.

This multiplication of announcements and openings of dedicated bike lanes makes the question of their proper referencing even more central. Updating the cartographic databases of local authorities represents a significant and yet essential task.

To facilitate and harmonize these efforts, transport.data.gouv.fr has worked over the past 18 months with Vélo & Territoires to develop a schema for cycling facilities. The chosen data schema was recently published and will facilitate the harmonization of cartographic data on cycling facilities produced and shared. It can be consulted on the data.gouv.fr website.

Open Data has played an important role in the valorization of data in recent years. Just as it is now almost unthinkable for a city's bus schedules not to be freely accessible to the public, opening data on cycling facilities is a lever for improving public services for cyclists.

Until now, each data producer sent data according to its own schema, not necessarily compatible with others, which significantly complicated their reuse. The new schema, largely based on that used on OpenStreetMap, has the strength of being compatible with three distinct uses:

• Proper display of this data, for example, in the context of printing a map or in CyclOSM.
• Easy calculation of statistics, for example, to feed our site www.amenagements-cyclables.fr, or the platform recently launched by the government.
• Reuse of data by bicycle route calculators.

With the official publication of this data schema, OpenStreetMap emerges as the reference database in terms of quality and ease of access to information on cycling facilities. Geovelo already actively contributes to this, not only through its collaborations with local authorities throughout France but also through numerous feedback from our users.

The schema that Geovelo had established in collaboration with Île-de-France Mobilités, APUR, and the Institut Paris Région served as a working basis for this standardization of data. Many improvements were made during the workshops organized by transport.data.gouv.fr and Vélo & Territoires, in which Geovelo participated alongside numerous local authorities, as well as stakeholders such as FUB and the ADAVA association.

Geovelo will continue to update cycling facilities data on OpenStreetMap, and the exports we provide to our local authority clients will soon be available in this new format, in addition to other formats already used. In addition to usage data, cartographic data is an integral part of the Geovelo offering for territories.