Legend

Interactive map

(⭐) Save in Google Maps

Sources

What’s the goal of this project?

Grass-roots

While well-connected, bike-friendly public infrastructure is something built over many years, information infrastructure created and popularized by regular citizens about the safe and convenient paths in the existing infrastructure can be the extra help needed for somebody to decide to plan a route to work or into nature.

It may also encourage somebody to just hang out with their bike and explore their town.

Apart from the obvious and immediate quality-of-life improvement on an individual level stemming from cycling, the grassroots popularization of cycling is also crucial for the realization of the long-term wish and demand by many of us to finally enjoy safe dedicated infrastructure, without the needless tension created between cyclists, pedestrians and drivers, as we inevitably get in each other’s way due to the current circumstances on the road in the bigger cities.

Free in the long-term and sustainable

GitHub

Principles used in open-source software, such as community contributions, version control, and forking ensure that collaborative work can continue even if the creator of the project stops contributing and maintaining it — unlike a service which may be put behind a paywall or deprecated at any point (such as Strava, anybody or any group of contributors can create a “fork” - their own copy of the project (Github Pages website, Google My maps map, etc.) and keep it accessible and maintained for other users or for personal use.

Platform-independent

Availability in different file formats (keeping multiple different representations of the collected data) makes up for ease of use on other platforms if needed. This makes sure that the project is not wholy dependend on any decisions of companies such as Google which file formats to support for their apps and services.

User-friendly

Usability on some of the most common apps that most Bulgarians already have on their smartphones (browsers, Google Maps, Google Earth) should leave little barrier to entry.

Accountable

Some rules will be established for the addition and approval of new routes in the community edition of the map to ensure that contributors and approvers have visited them.