About

The map belongs to everyone.

Every rider carries a private map: the fountain that saved a hot July, the climb worth the extra hour, the back road that's somehow always empty. Today that knowledge lives in one head and dies there. Cycling Commons is where it lives instead.

It's an open, community-built map of the world's best riding, for every kind of cycling. Open data anyone can use, governed by the riders who build it.

The problem

A different app for everything.

Climbs in one app, routes in another, places to sleep in a third, road conditions nowhere at all. Most of it closed, none of it joined up. Riders pay for a dozen tools and still can't see the whole picture. Most of the knowledge exists; it's just scattered and/or locked away.

The Commons gathers the non-personal knowledge, the map and never the rider, into one open place. Free to query, free to export, free to build on, by anyone at all.

What we believe
I Curation, not overload.

The best of a region, voted by riders, not an endless dump.

II The map, not the rider.

Open facts about places, not people. The Commons collects nothing about how, where, or when you ride.

III Open for everyone.

ODbL data, CC BY-SA 4.0 media, a free API: usable by anyone, commercial or not.

IV Governed, not just published.

Built on Elinor Ostrom's principles for commons that don't collapse or get captured.

Elinor Ostrom showed that communities can govern a shared resource without privatising it and without a central owner. She shared the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Oliver E. Williamson, her half for her analysis of the commons. The Governance page maps each principle to a part of the system.

Partners, not silos

Where good open data exists, we join it.

The Commons isn't here to rebuild what others have already opened. We build on OpenStreetMap and contribute back to it. And for the layers we don't own, like bike-friendly places to sleep, we'd rather partner with open communities, such as open hospitality networks, than wall off a private copy of their data.

Open data should connect, not fragment further. Every partnership makes the whole atlas richer without anyone enclosing it.

How it gets made

Five kinds of people, one loop.

  • Riders find water, food, repair stops, climbs and places to sleep on one map. They check a route before they set off, or plan it around what the map shows and finish it in the planner they already use.
  • Contributors add what they find on the road, from a new tap to a closed bridge. A curator checks each addition before it goes live.
  • Curators look after a region they know: they review what riders send in, keep that part of the map true, and bring the Commons to riders there.
  • Makers build the platform itself: code, data pipelines, design, translations and funding.
  • Builders take the open data into their own apps and tools, free under an open licence, so it reaches riders wherever they ride. In time, what their users add comes back through the same API.
Who stewards it

BikeCoders today, a foundation tomorrow.

BikeCoders seeds and stewards the Commons today. But the commitment is public from day one: open licence, separate data and accounts, and a path to spin out into an independent foundation once there's a community to govern it. Everything already released, code and data alike, stays open for good: no future owner, sale or change of heart can take it back.

Explore the map → Check your route (GPX) Create a free account