A Wonderfully Simplified Map of San Francisco's Bicycle Infrastructure

Drivers who stop to ask Mat Kladney for directions are in for a frustrating day. Because Kladney bicycles all over San Francisco, the route he instinctively gives weaves through town like a madman's marathon – great for cyclists, unnatural and awful for motorists.

"As a longtime cyclist, I recently realized that the mental map that exists in my mind of San Francisco is different from most (and importantly does not exist in print form)," Kladney writes at "See-Through Maps," a cartography symposium held earlier this month at UC Berkeley. To satisfy his personal curiosity, he sat down one recent day to translate the map in his head into one you can view online. The result is this wonderfully simplified version of San Francisco's bicycle infrastructure, with routes between popular destinations given as colorized tubes not unlike the city's metro map.