Transportation
Bike Maps That Give Riders the Info They Actually Need
In Austin, maps are color-coded by comfort level rather than traffic-engineering standards.
Anyone who has ever used a bike map in an unfamiliar city knows that the colored lines showing the bike lane network can be hard to assess. Each municipality has its own system, and many of these are fairly crude, failing to give you any real clue as to what type of experience you’ll have when you’re on the ground riding.
Will the bike path marked on the map provide a pleasant pedal on a neighborhood street? Or a harrowing odyssey along a major arterial, with cars whizzing by at high speed? Even the more nuanced maps rarely take the cyclist’s level of comfort as the basis for their markings, using instead a classification approach based on the somewhat obscure terminology used by planners and engineers.