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BY Adele Peters

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In most cities, bike networks are rolled out in disconnected pieces. A bike lane on one street might not reach the next part of a route, so you can’t necessarily ride safely across town. A new set of software tools helps planners, bike advocates, and citizens design more complete networks, automatically filling the gaps in existing infrastructure or creating the whole thing from scratch.

Called BikeNetKit, the free, open-source software is based on eight years of research on bicycle infrastructure at Denmark’s IT University of Copenhagen.

When you type in a city name, the software pulls street data from OpenStreetMap, including a map of existing bike lanes. (Getting started requires a little technical knowledge: You have to know how to use Python, and then have to enter a few lines to install and run the algorithms.)

[Image: IT University of Copenhagen]

“Planners mostly think about the small picture—what if I add a lane here?…