About the project
🇧🇬 За версия на български натиснете тук. 🇧🇬
Table of contents:
Maps
Personal edition
Google Maps (2D)
Interactive map
(⭐) Save in Google Maps
Legend
Route Categories
- 🔵 Bike lanes
- 🔵 Bike lanes (not separated from traffic)
- 🟡 “Convenient” - Relatively comfortable and safe streets and shared areas *
- 🟠 Unpaved or difficult to traverse *
- 🟣 Wide or unused sidewalks * (See Section III. Art. 15 and Section XVIII. Art. 81 of the Road traffic act.)
- ⚪ Unexplored
* Based on subjective criteria.
Location Categories
- 🚉 Public transport 🚉
- 🚶♂️🚲 Crossing points on certain major boulevards 🚲🚶♂️
Google Earth (3D)
Sources
Collaborative edition (How can I contribute)
- Contact: velosofize@gmail.com
- Contribute through Github - more details will be published once enough potential contributors have shown interest. If you’re interested, reach out at the email above and see the for contributors page.
- Also see the alternatives - other projects worth contributing to.
What’s the goal of this project?
Grass-roots
While well-connected, bike-friendly public infrastructure is something built over many years, information infrastructure created and popularized by regular citizens about the safe and convenient paths in the existing infrastructure can be the extra help needed for somebody to decide to plan a route to work or into nature.
It may also encourage somebody to just hang out with their bike and explore their town.
Apart from the obvious and immediate quality-of-life improvement on an individual level stemming from cycling, the grassroots popularization of cycling is also crucial for the realization of the long-term wish and demand by many of us to finally enjoy safe dedicated infrastructure, without the needless tension created between cyclists, pedestrians and drivers, as we inevitably get in each other’s way due to the current circumstances on the road in the bigger cities.
Free in the long-term and sustainable
Principles used in open-source software, such as community contributions, version control, and forking ensure that collaborative work can continue even if the creator of the project stops contributing and maintaining it — unlike a service which may be put behind a paywall or deprecated at any point (such as Strava, anybody or any group of contributors can create a “fork” - their own copy of the project (Github Pages website, Google My maps map, etc.) and keep it accessible and maintained for other users or for personal use.
Platform-independent
Availability in different file formats (keeping multiple different representations of the collected data) makes up for ease of use on other platforms if needed. This makes sure that the project is not wholy dependend on any decisions of companies such as Google which file formats to support for their apps and services.
User-friendly
Usability on some of the most common apps that most Bulgarians already have on their smartphones (browsers, Google Maps, Google Earth) should leave little barrier to entry.
Accountable
Some rules will be established for the addition and approval of new routes in the community edition of the map to ensure that contributors and approvers have visited them.