Thursday, April 16, 2015

Mapping a Better Melbourne


Last year the Public Transport Not Traffic (PTNT) organisation in Melbourne asked the local community to help improve Melbourne's public transport network by mapping how the city's public transit system could be made better. You can view the results of all the suggestions received on the PTNT CrowdSpot Visualisation map. This map visualizes all the mapped improvements suggested to the campaign.

The Melbourne City Council obviously took some notice of this campaign because this year they have released their own CrowdSpot powered mapping project. Help Us Build a Better Cycling City is a map which local citizens can use to make suggestions about how cycling in Melbourne can be improved.


Users can click on the map to highlight locations where they experience 'issues & challenges when cycling', where cycling is enjoyable or where cycling could be improved. Each suggestion which has been made by users so far is shown on the map with a color-coded marker. You can also browse through the suggestions by scrolling down in the map sidebar.

The suggestions made to the map will be used by the City of Melbourne to help inform the draft of the city's Bicycle Plan 2016-2020. Hopefully when drafting the plan the city will also make use of the Melbourne Bike Crash Map.


The Melbourne Bike Crash Map plots five years of Melbourne cycling accidents on a Leaflet powered map.The map highlights the locations where bike crashes are most prevalent on Melbourne's streets.

You can filter the results shown on the map by 'all crashes', 'fatal crashes' and 'serious injury crashes'. You can also filter the results by time of a day. In addition the map provides a rough visualization of the amount of cycling traffic on each street based on Strava cycling data.

The intensity of the blue lines indicate the density of Strava recorded traffic. This should help cyclists assess the relevant safety of Melbourne's roads. For example a large section of Footscray Road seems to get heavy cycling traffic but has no recorded bike accidents. A quick check on Google Maps Street View shows that the road has a dedicated off-street bike path.

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