East Coast Greenway Route Planner

We wanted a clean interface that focused on one thing: Finding a route and getting you out!

Our routing system had to take any user-supplied location and find the closest part of the route

The elevation profile provides immediate insight into a route's difficulty.

With the Locate-me button enabled, the app updates the next turn cue live as you follow the route.

Rather than a custom web UI, route managers use QGIS, open source GIS software, and plugin to access data on Carto.com

Client: East Coast Greenway

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The East Coast Greenway is a remarkable custom-curated route, especially good for cyclists, that runs all the way from Key West, Florida, to Calais, Maine. It's the nation's longest connected biking and walking route, and the East Coast Greenway Alliance needed a revitalized online map and route planner to go along with a revamped overall web presence and a series of major events in summer 2017.

This project presented some deep challenges on top of what seemed at first pretty simple: Take an existing map and routing application with some significant usability issues and overhaul it with a new, clean interface and modern machinery under the hood. Since the data was working an existing app, it seemed likely to keep working.

Things got complicated, as they sometimes do, when we got under the hood. The existing app's usability limitations weren't just design issues. The underlying data was also a challenge.

Our GIS and interactive teams came together to overhaul and clean up the data, build a new client-side routing algorithm derived from years of experience, and then wrap the data and algorithm in a beautiful, mobile-first web application that draws data from the cloud (thanks to a grant from Carto.com), allows data editing by a distributed teams on multiple platforms (thanks to QGIS and some open source plugins).

Results: For the first time, the East Coast Greenway has a mobile-friendly routing web map that can take people all the way from Florida to Maine and back again.

Focus: Recreation

Services: Interactive Solutions, GIS Services, Data, Applications Development, Web Mapping, Website Design

Tags: Trail finder, trails

“ This is light years ahead of where we were. We're so thrilled with the work and the labor of love you have shown. ”

— Niles Barnes, Director of Greenway Programs

Project Years: 2017

GreenInfo Network

East Coast Greenway Route Planner

GreenInfo Network