Creating routes for the Bears of Sheffield project
This page is to support British Cycling Route Planners creating routes as part of the Bears of Sheffield initiate, raising awareness for The Children's Hospital Charity. Save this page as a bookmark so you can keep coming back to it.
What's the project?
British Cycling are supporting Sheffield's Children Hospital and Sheffield City Councils 'Bears of Sheffield' initiative through creating family friendly cycle routes. Through the expertise and kindness of volunteer Route Planners we hope to map cycle routes that visit multiple Bears of Sheffield locations, creating a fun experience for riders that encourage more activities on the bike.
How can you help and when:
- Tell us how many routes you would like to create - see the pledge section below.
- June 4th to July 2nd - complete the 'Online Route Planning Award training' and pass the training. Then register as a Volunteer Route Planner
- June 7th to July 9th - Create routes and upload them
- July 12th to 3rd Oct - Bears of Sheffield campaign and event
Designing a route:
Once you've completed the online route planning award, and registered as a volunteer route planner, then you are able to create routes specifically for the Bears of Sheffield project. Here's what to do next:
1. Pick out what bears you'd like to visit using the maps of the bears location. Tell Jonathan Powell what bears you're wanting to include in your route (just so routes aren't duplicated)/
2. Create a family-friendly route visiting those bears:
- With family friendly routes its important to design the route using traffic-free cycling infrastructure, or to avoid using roads at all.
- Keep the routes short in distance. We advise routes to be no longer than 6 miles.
- You may want to design a route that allows families to walk alongside children riding their bikes. Consider families with push chairs.
3. Can you design your route so it's still a great experience without the bears in it? Extra points for those who can!
Creating a route
- Create a .gpx file
Uploading Routes
E-mail your route description and .gpx file to Jonathan Powell, Community Activator for Sheffield.
Pledge the number of routes you can create...
As Route Planners we'd like you to pledge how many routes you are able to create for this campaign. Pledging gives us an idea of how many routes to expect, so we can communicate this to our partners and respective marketing teams, but also allows us to celebrate a target if we hit it. With pledging it is anonymous, and you won't be held accountable for not hitting your target pledge. So go on, tell us how many routes you pledge to create as part of this pilot?
