b'36 Partner News Winter 2023CorporateBelow, Alexander McNaughton, Senior Engineer in Swecos Active Travel team reflects on the development of this innovative digital toolkit in collaboration with wider Geospatial (GIS), Pavement and Decarbonisation teams.Commuting by bicycle can be a fast and enjoyable way to get around when compared with sitting in traffic or even on the bus. However, getting people to choose this option more frequently requires access to good high-quality active travel infrastructure.While cities and communities are developing their own active travel infrastructure, rural communities are lagging behind due to the sheer breadth of challenges they face. South of Scotland Enterprisethrough the CivTech initiativehas recognised this issue and has set the following challenge:How can technology unlock the power of the bike, stimulating demand for cycling infrastructure and support South of Scotland communities?Gearing up for aAlex continues: The Scottish Governments CivTech Challenge acts as a technology accelerator hub, based in Edinburgh. They link the public sector and the private sector cycling revolutionto solve problems and grow businesses.With Swecos technical expertise in Active Travel, path construction techniques and GIS based tools, we were perfectly placed to with Swecostake this challenge head on.In the initial Competitive Exploration phase of the challenge, we outlined our initial innovative newsolution of using the latest 3D Visualisation technology and knowledge in innovative material choices for path construction to promote new ways of showing people what route-making tool active travel in rural areas can look like.Following our success in this stage we moved on to the Accelerator stage, expanding our ideas under an intense 15-week programme to develop our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) solution. This was designed to look not Swecos Build Your Bike Route innovation is a newonly at what active travel can look like, but to develop a support toolkit aimed at helping web-based toolkit currently being developed with Southusers design high level active travel routes of Scotland Enterprise and Scottish Government. Its aimwith a data-led approach, through GIS web mapping tools.is to help deliver better Active Travel routes across rural This toolkit in turn became Swecos Build regionsby utilising data and community-led evidence Your Bike Route (BYBR) platform. It is an online resource that users can access to gain a deeper understanding of active'