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Applying GIS for bicycle and hiking tourist route developing

I love bicycles and love a lot of things connected with them.

For many years I am one of those guys who was deeply involved in developing the bicycle movement in Belarus in different aspects: from urban cycling to cycling promotion.

I agree with them. But we need to explain that mostly route developing is an office work with necessity to prepare documents, make a calls and speak with local authorities for a project negotiation. Of course project manager needs to do some work connecting with route planning (best on bike:), speaking with locals, assets installations — this is the most interesting part of work. The same we can say about hiking route.

In this article I will talk about tasks connected with preparing bike route projects and about route marking project as a part of it.

We think that times when people use non-map-based project are in past. So in this article I will explain our experience, our ideas and our map-based software.

INFOTRAF is web interface GIS, based on cloud service. So users can work using a laptop in office, smartphone or tablet directly on the road and work simultaneously with others.

I hope that our product will find new customers and help them to solve their tasks. Note that not all features I speak we have already finished in our software but anyway we can make it in case of you have an interest.

So let’s go to understand how GIS can help route developers.

When you create routes you need to solve different tasks depending on your role. Let’s counts such tasks:

Moreover, you need some functions:

Let’s bike deeper and look at these tasks in details.

It’s one of the main tasks. You need to perform it after choosing roads for the route (route planning).

Typically you need to use hundreds signs for hundreds kilometres.

Before making a sign project you need to gather information about already installed road signs and road poles on the route’s roads. Most known modern tool for that is video recording through roads and after that manual or AI recognition signs and poles from video streams. To our experience for bicycle and hiking routes video streams are not so convenient. We do not like it for 2 reasons:

Next stage is to upload all photos to GIS. Best if your GIS can do it automatically — just choose a folder with photos and make photos as a photo-object.

Just only uploading photos is nothing. After that you need to design sign and register its location directly into the GIS as an object. INFOTRAF has special tools for working with signs. You just need to choose the appropriate type of sign from the panel, insert it on appropriate place, orientate it. Also it is necessary to choose bracket type according to pole type, add other attributes and add extra information.

What if we need for making special sign design, like next one? You should to make it separately in special graphic editor. In GIS you can add such new-type sign item as special sign.

That’s all. Now you have map-based sign project.

In INFOTRAF in one click you can generates a special design report for project approving by local authority, police and others. For selecting signs you need just choose necessary route (each sign should has corresponding attribute) or select signs by polygon.

Also in one click INFOTRAF can perform multi page PDF with layout of sign project:

This is the next obligatory stage on which you get an information for ordering manufacture of different signs, brackets, poles etc. Best if it easy to count and get in one click on table view or export in popular format such as xls:

Now after project adopting you are ready to go and mount signs. After that you can make a final photo and add it to the sign object into GIS.

Actually some signs may be located on a trees, route may be marked by color — it’s worth to add to GIS too.

Shelters, info boards and other assets are important route elements and no doubt should be stored in GIS as separate objects.

INFOTRAF is server based GIS, so it may provides selected data for website or application in real time. Keeping all information in one place, changing something and don’t repeat changes in other databases is an obligatory feature if we want to make developer life easier.

The same we can say about possibility to generate kml/gpx files that contain routes and points for navigators. GIS software must generate it automatically.

Developing bicycle road infrastructure usually is not a task for route developers. Anyway it is necessary to store information about infrastructure for route planning, gathering problem spots, etc.

For example INFOTRAF has special design tools for inventory road infrastructure assets: road signs, road marking and other objects with attributes and physical parameters.

Without additional words such features can save developer’s time and make process easy. INFOTRAF has a special tools for project negotiation.

Frankly speaking project manager has a lot of tasks which are boring, nervous or energy stealing. That's why sometimes PM starts to simplify his/her tasks and refuse to perform some really nice ideas. GIS technology save time, decrease developers efforts and reduce project mistakes. And give more time for planning, fun and creating best quality routes.

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