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🗺️ City Scope launches new 'Cycle Scope' tool

The cycle scope web interface, showing a map of Edinburgh with routes under development marked out and differently coloured map marking dots for roadworks and improvements at varying stages of traffic disruption

City Scope, a user-friendly and modern planning and development portal built by friend of edi.bike Harry Williams, has this week launched a dedicated active travel portal on its website called Cycle Scope - hot on the heels of their recently released tracker for Active Travel Investment delays.

The resource is formed from a number of sources of data — the Scottish Roadworks Commissioner, the City of Edinburgh Council's Quiet Routes, Core Paths network, and the Active Travel Investment Programme - both routes that have been consulted on and approved to proceed, and those still pending approval.

With such a wealth of information, it can be hard to know where to start. Using the 'Status' filter in the sidebar, we can untick all of the roadworks ('Advanced Planning' through 'Recorded'), turning on a couple of the data layers, and take a look at the some of the route maps:

The cycle scope web interface, showing a map of Edinburgh with planned cycle routes marked in royal blue and existing on-road segregated cycling achieved through recent experimental orders (now permanent) marked in light blue

The light blue routes are currently labelled 'Experimental TRO schemes'. Of course, thanks to a run of recent approvals at the Council's Traffic Regulation Order Sub-committee, the majority of these are being made permanent - so there are a handful of routes in light blue that are still 'experimental' in nature, but the majority are guaranteed to stay.

In royal blue, are the Active Travel Investment Programme routes. Some of these are also in red; potentially the distinction between these being that routes in red have not yet been approved at committee following the consultation phase.

The same cycle scope web interface, but with the addition of the core path network marked in green and existing quiet routes marked with pink route lines

Other layers that can be turned on with flags in the sidebar include the network of Quiet Routes (in pink) and the 'core path' network (in green). Where these overlap with other layers - for example the Greenbank to Meadows quiet route - these are sometimes overlaid with e.g. Experimental TRO routes.

A closer view of the cycle scope web interface, showing a map of the southern half of Edinburgh city centre filtered for roadworks that are in progress. A map node at Summerhall has been selected and so a details panel shows on the right describing the road layout changes that are being made including a new hard-segregated cycleway

Enabling just the 'In progress' roadworks items under the 'Status' sidebar area gives us a smaller subset of roadworks across active travel, and clicking on one of these map nodes such as in the screenshot above of the current Summerhall works gives a summary and scheduled work dates in an additional sidebar, as well as the level of expected disruption to traffic (the basis for the colour-coded map markers).

The cycle scope web interface, showing a more localised map of the Braid Estate with the route of the Greenbank to Meadows Quiet Route passing through, and a selected roadworks map marker showing more information in the details panel about the introduction in April onwards of segregated cycle lane defenders and lining on Braid Avenue

Disabling 'In progress' again in favour of 'Advanced Planning' provides an insight into what's scheduled for future dates - like this work on the Braid Estate scheduled conveniently after local councillors' standards committee hearings over undeclared conflicts of interest when the vote was taken.

There's likely more to come from Cycle Scope - another great tool for making sense of ongoing progress towards a safer city for sustainable transport.