Tour de France Maps

A few days ago the Tour de France began in England. To honor the English "Grand Depart" cupajoe, a user on visual.ly designed this London Underground style tour map.

In truly British style, it shows the English Channel as a mere river to cross and does not delineate boundaries with Belgium or Spain, two countries that also share part of the route. The color scheme is not very useful, except to help translate the legend. However, this kind of map should not need a legend. It's much easier to have the dates right on the map and the starts and finishes of each stage clearly defined. The map below (from Cycling Weekly) does a better job in all respects and shows true geography. It's also more readable and much more attractive.  

There must be a higher resolution version of this map but I have been unable to find it. It would be nice to be able to read the Légende and the tiny credits on the lower left of the map.
Update - Thanks to an anonymous commenter, we now have link to a higher resolution version of this map.

This map also makes for a nice mug.

More on Bike Sharing

I forgot to mention in my last post Oliver O'Brien's excellent bike share maps. These maps show live data about the availability of the stations for a large number of cities worldwide. Many of them are cities I didn't know had a bike share like San Antonio.

At the bottom are figures showing the number of full and empty docks. If you click a station you get a graph of the daily usage activity for each station. There are other options including animations of daily activity for each city. I like the red (full) to blue (empty) default color scheme...

but if you don't like it you can change it to numerous other color schemes such as "fiery." 

Below is Paris at 4:00 PM, confirming the pattern I saw when I was there in March; it's difficult to find a place to return the bike in the central part of the city in the middle of the day. There's a lot of commuting going on and the success of the system is making it difficult to find parking.

Bike Sharing Systems

A couple of interesting bike sharing graphics crossed my desk recently. Martin Austwick created videos of the Boston and Minneapolis bike sharing programs based on data released by the local agencies. Here is Boston. Click to get to the video.

 

The videos show approximate bike locations for each minute of the day. You can see the daily rises and dips in activity. It's remarkable how much activity there is at night (especially in October when it gets dark early.) Around 4AM it gets almost eerily silent and stays that way for a few hours.

For some reason the colors for the Minneapolis video and much more muted and the system is more spread out so it's not as visually arresting. Still, there's an impressive amount of activity throughout the day and night.

David Yanofsky created this graphic comparing the 29 worldwide bike sharing programs, all at the same scale.

This is an interesting  picture of both the programs and the comparative layout of each city. It also serves as a good reminder of how many significant places there are in Asia that we in North America have never even heard of. Even I had to look up Changwon and Zhongshan, both cities of over a million people.

Improving City Biking

To honor National Bike Month, these maps show some modest steps that a city can take to make a city significantly more bikeable. A report from the Mineta Transportation Institute and discussed in The Atlantic shows how the layout of the city of San Jose creates disconnected islands of low stress bicycle routes.

 The map above shows only the two lowest levels of stress. The green streets are considered suitable for children and the blue are streets that most adults "will tolerate."

Some modest improvements (the red lines below) can go a long way towards making the city more connected and making major destinations such as college campuses easier to access. It would be nice if these two maps were at the same scale for comparative purposes but the idea still comes across.

The report does not layout specific suggestions for types of improvements but co-author Peter Furth argues that most of the suggestions have low to moderate costs. "Even the higher cost solutions are still an incredible bargain, 10 times less expensive than the kind of infrastructure we do for transit or highways."

The Tokyo Zoo Project-Geoglyphs!

The nav-U, a personal navigation device that can be mounted on a bicycle, started the Tokyo Zoo Project. This is a virtual zoo where the animals are drawn by cycling through the streets of Tokyo.

  You can zoom in and click the animals for route details such as this:

For more precise directions you can go to the PetaMap site.

There's also a how to page that shows how the elephant was created. This page gives you some interesting details encountered on the ride such as the line of cats along the elephant's trunk in "Cat Town;"

and along the banners of the nearby shopping street.

Thanks to Rafael from Urban Demographics for sending me this link.

Map of the Weekend-Riding the Hubway

Yesterday Boston finally caught up to Washington, DC and Minneapolis and started a bike share program - the Hubway. They have an interactive map showing the stations and availability of bicycles at each one.

 

Currently the system serves limited areas but they plan to expand it into Cambridge, Somerville and other neighborhoods in Boston. I have not had a chance to try it out yet (as I did in Montreal - see the comments section from this post) but the Boston Globe did and posted this somewhat unfair article where they raced it against the subway and a taxi. In addition to the indirect route the bicyclist took, she also needed to purchase a membership pass. I've cycled on those streets and find it hard to believe that it would take half an hour to get from the library to Bobby Orr. Anyway the graphic is well done.

If you're in town give it a ride. The streets are not ideal for cycling but it's still the best way to see a new place or get a new perspective on a familiar one.

Bicycling on the Google Trails

I was looking at a bicycling route in eastern Pennsylvania when I discovered that Google Maps now has a bicycling option. It is available under the "Traffic" tab - click on "more" to access it.

They don't provide you with a legend but it looks like the dark green are off-road paths and trails, lighter green are bike lanes and dashed lines are proposed routes. The maps tend to be optomistic-some of these routes are impassible mudholes in the spring as I recently discovered. Other paths look like this one.

The picture above is of the circled path below. I thought it looked like an odd place for an off road path so I looked it up on street view and unless the DRPA has changed its policy then this can't legally be considered a bicycle route. Note also the continuing presence of Quebec Route 366 throughout our country.

Bicycling directions are also available by clicking the bicycle icon (the far right choice at the top.) Of course, this is also subject to google errors such as telling you to take Quebec Route 366 across western Pennsylvania.

Upon further review the driving route still appears as the first choice. You have to scroll down on these directions to see that this is not actually the suggested bicycle route. You can't ride your bike on Quebec Route 366 through Greensburg because it is a limited access highway. The bicycle route finds a way to sensibly avoid central Greensburg. However, they still direct you onto some sections of the highway that don't look very legal or safe.
Where there are bicycling trails the directions they will find them and give you a pretty good route.

It's good to see the Google giving bicycling some attention and the tools are useful, if not perfect. They also make me want to try some new routes. So get on your bike and enjoy the summer!

The Montreal Bike Fest

Bike month concludes with the Montreal Bike Fest, a week long celebration and North America's largest bicycling event. The festival involves several rides, a week of commuting activities, and related events. I have been to the festival several times and plan to be there again this year.

This Saturday things kick off with the Metropolitan Challenge, a 75-150 kilometer ride through the nearby countryside. I did the 100K ride a few years ago and it was lots of fun and not as difficult as it sounds. The following weekend has a Friday night ride and another one Sunday afternoon. These rides involve closing the roads to motor vehicles allowing cyclists to take over the streets. The Friday night ride (Tour la Nuit) draws approximately 12,000 enthusiastic riders, many in costume and with creative bike light displays. The Sunday ride (Tour de l'Ile) gets at least 30,000 and has had up to 45,000 riders. The 52K course (below) covers much of the city and is a great way to see neighborhoods you may not otherwise get to.

The route changes every year. This year they head west. There's usually crowds of enthusiastic spectators urging you on and in past years they have had a house decorating contest for residents along the route. 52K may sound long but my wife who's not a cycling nutcase like I am has done it several times and I bet you can too!

While in town I hope to get a chance to explore the Bixi. Montreal's new bike sharing program. Modeled after the Paris Velib system, it should look familiar to frequent readers of these pages. Here is a part of the Bixi system.


I hope I've inspired you to come up to Montreal or to at least dig your bicycle out of storage. Have a great end to your bike month!

More Bike Month-EuroVelo

Bike month is coming and going quickly-so here's a bonus, two posts in one week!

EuroVelo, the European bicycle route network, is a project of the European Cyclists' Federation. Much of this text has been lifted from their web site. EuroVelo is made up of 12 routes, totaling over 66,000 km, of which about 45,000 km is already in place.

The EuroVelo routes are made up of existing and planned bicycle routes at a regional and national level. Their web site includes implementation guidelines for on-road and greenway routes. There are also guidelines for signage. Examples abound!

Some of the routes have their own web sites. Route 6, the Atlantic-Black Sea (Schwarzes Meer) route has an interactive map. If you click a section of the route... well, nothing happens! But hopefully they are working on details about each section of the route.

The Philadelphia Bike Map Wiki

I was looking for bicycling information for my upcoming trip to Philadelphia when I came across the Philadelphia Bike Map Wiki. This page was created by the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia. It allows users to locate hazards, good cycling routes, accidents, construction, favorite bike shops and places where bike lanes are blocked or ignored by drivers or the authorities.

If you click on the angry yellow driver icons you get some truly awful stories about the kind of drivers we cyclists routinely have to deal with. Even in a bronze medal winning community.




There is also lots of good information about places to avoid and good places to go- it's not all negative stuff. I don't know if this wiki has reached City Hall to help improve conditions or the (lack of) law enforcement but at least the cyclists have some good information. Now if I can only remember what info I was looking for originally....

Velib!-Bicycle Month, Part Deux.

Paris is the envy of the bicycling world with its very successful bike share program, Velib'. The program is self service and allows the user to pick up a bike at any "service point" and drop it off anywhere else. The service points (stations) are available 24 hours/7 days a week and are spaced 300 meters apart. The purple icons represent stations. Each station has about 20 bike stands and a card reader to allow the user to access the bikes.

The maps illustrate how well the stations cover the city. Are all maps of Paris are required to show pictograms of the monuments?




This detailed section shows that even the edges of the city are well covered.




I have not been to Paris since they implemented this program but it looks like fun and its success has spawned imitations throughout Europe. Even some US cities are considering the program.
I like these zoomed way out google map views from their station finder. They illustrate the density and reach of the program.





La ville est plus belle a velo!

Happy National Bicycle Month!-Post 1

Though we've had rainy, lousy bicycling weather here since the 1st, May is National Bicycle Month. At the risk of being overly self-indulgent and boring my map readers to tears, I plan on making May's posts all be bicycle related to honor the month. This first map is from the League of American Bicyclists. They put out a very nice brochure listing their designated "Bicycle Friendly Communities". These communities were given medals - Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze. There are photos and descriptions of projects in each city. Unfortunately the map on their web site is lousy. The dots are too small, the contrast is terrible, the background color is too dark making the little dots hard to see and the color scheme is not very logical. Brown = Silver? Blue = Bronze? The map is interactive in that you can click on a state, get the community list and click each city or town to get a page with photos, its highlights, and accomplishments. You can also see your state's rank. Patterns? Mostly West Coast and college towns with some other clusters in Arizona and Colorado. Until the recent additions of Philly and New York the northeast was looking pretty bare. We're still awful and we know it!

Map of the Week - Bicycle Crashes

As some of you know, I was whacked by a car on my bike this past week. Here's a diagram of approximately what happened courtesy of the City of Toronto's Tips for Avoiding Car-Bike Collisions page.
Take away the traffic lights, train tracks and the fact that drivers in other places actually use turn signals and you get the picture. Technically I hit the car but I couldn't stop that quickly - she could and didn't. Anyway I'm still alive and well - just a bit beat up. I thought I'd look for some good bicycle accident maps but there's not much out there. Ghostcycle did a cool thing placing "ghostcycles" at accident sites in Seattle to raise awareness. Unfortunately their google mashup doesn't work (don't try the map-your computer will be sorry).
I was looking for something localized to see if there are local patterns to these crashes. The best thing I could come up with is this map from the Portland Oregonian. X's mark fatalities and you can click the dots for more info.There may be patterns here but I don't know that city well enough to spot them. Anyway keep on riding but be safe, read your tips and don't expect drivers to see you just because you're wearing dayglow colors and it's bright and sunny or you'll end up in a sling like me!

MOTW #34

This is a map outlining the places I rode my bike during my May-June bicycling vacation in Quebec. I went up there for the Montreal Bike Festival and did a bunch of other rides in the Laurentians.