OZ Bike Trails

MAD ride picture

Melbourne Autumn Day (MAD) ride - 2007. Mountain bike ride around the Wombat State Forest at Woodend. 65km and about 5 hours later I made it.

 

Cycling infrastructure via Open Street Map

Open Street Map, the Wikipedia of maps, has got to the point where it now describes a substantial amount of the cycling infrastructure in Australia. With the appropriate tools, the cycling data can be extracted from the OSM database and reformatted as kml.

Google Earth

Off road shared paths and on road lane infrastructure for all of Australia from OSM, shown as green and blue lines respectively, can be viewed in Google Earth (free download) with the aid of this KML file Cycling infrastructure in Australia. Try this one for NZ Cycling infrastructure in New Zealand.

Slippy maps

The same data as described above can be overlaid on NearMap aerial photography and on to various Google maps and imagery: BigYak Bike Trails

The map also has other layers such as the time by bike layer, which allows you to lock a set of concentric rings centered on say you home location. Each ring represents 5 minutes by bike. The average travel by bike speed can be set to suit your own average.

Another layer is the Open Cycle Map which is also based on the Open Street Map database.

The map also allows the Australian Bureau of Meteorology weather radar images to be viewed.

JOSM

JOSM (Java Open Street Map) allows anyone to edit the Open Street Map database. So if you see something on the map that needs to be improved, then there is really nothing stopping you from doing so.

JOSM - cycling presets

For JOSM users - you may want to take advantage of a cycling preset. This preset allows the tagging process to be done quickly and accurately.

All that needs to be done is to download the XML preset file and then set the path to the preset file in the JOSM preferences. Read the installation details.

Further downloads

These downloads are collection of miscellaneous GE KML stuff that may be of interest.

Google Earth downloads (version 4 or better required):


Miscellaneous - web sites, not KML files: