National cycle mapping standard: the Cheltenham Standard road grades

Most UK cycle maps only show designated routes, highlighting shared paths and painted lanes in bright colours while leaving the rest of the local area blank. This creates a misleading picture of how people actually travel to work. Everyday riders usually take the most direct route that suits their ability, which often is not a designated route, and few trips start and end on a cycle route. A designated route might add a mile to the commute or force a frustrating crossing at a hostile roundabout.

The blank spaces hide the places where most cycling actually happens. A single disjointed path does not make a network. If you have to navigate three miles of fast dual carriageway just to reach the safe path, the safe path is effectively useless for a standard commute. Everyday cycling requires continuity. A map that only shows isolated fragments of infrastructure fails to help someone planning a real ride from their front door to their desk.

The Cheltenham Cycle Campaign saw the fundamental flaw in these blank spaces and pioneered an alternative that graded every single road in the entire local network. Instead of just highlighting the good bits, they assessed the entire street grid based on the cycling skill required to navigate it safely. The system tied map grades directly to the National Standard for Cycle Training levels.

If a road changed character halfway along, the grade changed with it. You might have a wide suburban avenue that narrows suddenly at a pinch point choked with parked cars and pedestrian islands. The map would shift its rating exactly where the physical conditions worsened. This incremental approach showed highway authorities exactly where their network failed. When a council planner can see a continuous line of safe streets suddenly interrupted by a severe hazard, the priority for future funding becomes glaringly obvious.

The system runs on reality.

The Cheltenham system split the network into five colour-coded categories. Yellow marks the quiet roads suitable for all riders, with low traffic volumes and simple layouts. Green indicates through routes with moderate traffic and low speeds. Blue covers busy traditional roads, including some A and B roads, with few heavy goods vehicles and room to overtake. Red marks busy principal roads with some heavy goods vehicles, restricted width, high speeds and complex junctions. Purple is reserved for fast, busy roads with frequent heavy goods vehicles, slip roads and large roundabouts, for the most skilled riders only.

The grades were linked to the levels of the National Standard for Cycle Training, which Bikeability now delivers in England at three levels. A map reader could match the colour of a road to the training they had done.

The idea was too useful to stay isolated in one town. The federation and the CTC took the Cheltenham model and proposed it as a national standard for local groups to follow, with a standard and guidance notes for groups. Maps using the grading covered Gloucester, Stroud, Kettering and Warrington.

It gave volunteers a highly structured way to look at their own streets. They were no longer just writing vague letters asking the local council for better routes. They were handing over a complete diagnostic chart of the local traffic environment. When you map an entire town this way, the resulting document serves as a baseline survey that replaces emotion with categorised data. You cannot fix a junction if the council refuses to acknowledge that the junction is dangerous. The standard provided a shared language to force that acknowledgement.

Digital mapping eventually caught up with paper projects, and the OpenStreetMap wiki still holds a detailed page on the Cheltenham Standard. Some contributors proposed adding a specific cyclability key to the database to match the five colours, but the wider mapping community did not adopt it. OpenStreetMap prefers observable data to aggregate ratings. The wiki also notes that the existing highway tag already approximates the standard well, so mappers should not take on extra work to add the grades.

You can still apply the principles of the standard to your own local area today. The exercise forces you to look closely at the kerbs, the lane widths and the sightlines that dictate street safety. Take the plans for a proposed council scheme and try to grade the roads feeding into it. Count the bikes. See exactly where riders choose to position themselves at a difficult junction.

If the council proposes a new route, check if it links two green roads or simply dumps riders onto a purple one. A route that ends abruptly at a multi-lane roundabout is not an improvement. Write your feedback based on those physical conditions. Base your objections on the measurements you take. Send the exact dimensions to the planning department. The campaign guides explain how to turn a survey into a consultation response, and the glossary covers the terms on council plans.