David Boudreault and Olivier Carbonneau got together and decided to index the network of most popular bike paths in the world - 1.346 million kilometers - in a single free smart phone app.

Why? Well, they wanted to ride everywhere themselves. Carbonneau developed the CycleMap application about two years ago, when he was looking at .pdf bike maps of his own hometown of Quebec City, and felt there weren't many good bike mapping options for smart phones. Once he got started, Carbonneau figured he might as well use available open source data to map the entire globe's good bike paths.

© CycleMap

Last year he hooked up with David Boudreault, an entrepreneur, and they decided to put out both free and $4.99 versions of CycleMap.

The pair say in their press release that CycleMap has been downloaded in 75 countries to date.

"CycleMap is an indispensable application for planning and enjoying bike rides, be it in Quebec, Canada, the United States, Japan, Sweden or elsewhere across the planet," says David Boudreault, president and co-founder of Ratomic Lab, the company distributing CycleMap.

© CycleMap

The $4.99 PRO version of the app tells users the type of path (stone dust, asphalt, paved, etc.), the elevation of the paths and a tool with different itineraries. Users can also save their search history and favorites, find the nearest bike shop if they run into a problem and record maps and travel itineraries in offline mode.

CycleMapPRO also shows the stations and availability of bike share in 176 cities.

The team plans to add a mountain biking component to the maps in the next version, and an Android version is on the way.

Source: treehugger.com

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