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.
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. The knowledge exists; it's just scattered and locked away.
The Commons gathers the non-personal knowledge — the map, never the rider — into one open place. Free to query, free to export, free to build on, by anyone at all.
Open facts about places, not people — the Commons collects nothing about how, where, or when you ride.
ODbL data, CC BY-SA media, a free API — usable by anyone, commercial or not.
The best of a region, voted by riders, not an endless dump.
Built on Elinor Ostrom's principles for commons that don't collapse or get captured.
Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for showing that communities can govern a shared resource sustainably — without privatising it and without a central owner — when a few design principles are in place: clear boundaries, rules set by the people affected, monitoring, and graduated penalties. The Cycling Commons applies them; the Governance page maps each principle to a part of the system.
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.
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 (a Dutch Stichting) once there's a community to govern it. The open licence and separate ownership make later enclosure hard to do quietly.