Bikely bike routes. Yours to share and discover.

Thursday 10 August 2006 by Edward.

Travelling by bike, especially as a tourist in a car-dominated city, can be challenging. Website Bikely.com hopes to ease this burden. It’s a site designed by cyclists, built and updated by cyclists. The routes are bike-friendly. Early I had posted a Dutch bike route planner with a different orientation.

In less than 3 months, over 2,700+ routes covering 30+ countries have been posted. These routes are listed by country and by route name. You locate the route of interest then display it on Google Map. Routes nearby can also be listed. Click to start the tour and a detailed map appears showing placemarks and some comments along the route. Each placemark shows how far (in miles or kilometres) we are along. One can download a .GPX file for GPS use.

In correspondence with the site manager, one of Jules’ favourite entries is the 34km Sunshine-Maribyrnong Loop. Jules anticipates multimedia tags will be included by cyclists in future as technology progresses. Jules adds, “Well I’m a cyclist and all my users are cyclists so their opinions did, and will continue to, shape development of the site”. “Expect to see more comments, route ratings and bookmarking facilities.”

This website is new, with a forum only months old, but with many entries posted to date. A development I anticipate with growing popularity of this site is a global map with start-of-route placemarks — zooming in to an area of interest, to show more details and a listing.

Jules recommends to all bike tour operators to get some of their routes plotted on Bikley.com and make them available through their website. Jules, it won’t be long.

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