copyright 1996, Tracy-Williams Consulting
Bicycle maps have been produced for many years and for many purposes. Early work (around the turn of the cetury and before) was basically an attempt to show the territory and suggest where such thing as 20% grades and quagmire-like wagon roads would be found.
Cycling organizations of the time produced some fascinating maps that show just how much road conditions have improved. One would have been hard-pressed to find a paved rural road of the kind often considered necessary for today's on-road cycle tourist. When cycling went out of fashion, it seems that cycle maps pretty much followed.
In all likelihood, the typical bike map of the '30s, '40S and '50s was a rough line drawing that circulated among cyclists. It most likely served its purpose and since there were few cyclists for whom to produce maps, there was little need for going further.
With the explosive growth in the sales of adult-sized multi-geared bicycles during the '60s and early '70s, a new market appeared for bike maps. Many newly converted adult riders wanted to go places on their bikes. They also wanted some help choosing routes-or at least this was the perception of those who wanted to produce bike maps. Considering the popularity of the bicycle touring map efforts of groups like Bikecentennial (now called the Adventure Cycling Association) and numerous authors offering books of touring maps of different areas, it appears that these perceptions were well-founded.
Current mapping projects are diverse. When looking at the whole field, one can find few commonalities: stated purpose, scale, level of graphic effort (or expertise), type of paper (or plastic or ether), size and format, symbol use, field research approach, budget, evaluation process (if any), distribution system, etc. Most of these vary from map to map.
Further, there has been an evolution of mapping efforts over the past fifteen to twenty years. During the first years of the most recent bike boom, urban bike maps showed "official bike routes." These maps appear to have been, to some extent, public relations efforts produced by local agencies. The primary intent was to show cyclists where the special facilities were.
For the most part, the maps were sketchy, often showing little more than the designated routes themselves. A bicyclist whose destination didn't lie along the routes was often out of luck. Such maps were not really navigational tools. As evidence, consider that few early urban bike maps included a street index. One of the first bike maps with such an index was the Vancouver (B.C.) bicycle map, produced in the 1980s by the Bicycling Association of British Columbia.
While urban bike maps were going through what might be termed a "Route PR" phase, more and more recreational bike maps were showing up. Some of these were cleaned-up versions of the earlier rough line drawings, showing someone's idea of an interesting day ride in the country. But another trend emerged: bike maps began to show linear multi-day routes. Three of the early routes were Bikecentennial's "Trans-America Trail," the East Coast Bicycling Congress' "East Coast Bike Route," and North Carolina's "Mountains-to-the-Sea" route. These maps emerged in the mid- to late-1970s and all are still available in some form.
Route maps like these showed long corridors by breaking them into segments with each one on a separate map or separate panel within a larger sheet of maps. Each map, which would serve a bicyclist for about a day and would fit into a standard map pouch on a bicycle's handlebar bag. [Some early attempts almost fit into a map pouch.] Some maps ignored surrounding roads completely, making it disastrous if one somehow got off the strictly defined route.
Some examples (not the three listed above, by the way) were based on negligible field research. One route, for example, identified as suitable for cycling on a map produced by a midwestern state government, included a lengthy section of road consisting of deep loose sand. Sadly, most cyclists didn't learn of this problem until they encountered it on bike and by then there was no alternative but to push their bikes through and phone in their "feedback" later.
Over the years, people who have stuck to the touring route approach (e.g., the Adventure Cycling Association or North Carolina's Office of Bicycle and Pedestrian Transportation) have made many improvements, some obvious and some subtle. Many changes have been based on feedback from map users.
Several states (Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin, for example) have produced maps showing large geographical areas, rather than specific route corridors. These tend to rate the entire network of rural roads by various criteria: truck and car traffic, width, hazards, etc. Wisconsin's approach, for example, used a series of formulas that combined traffic volumes with percentages of truck traffic and the frequency of passing opportunities to rate roads on the ease with which bicyclists and motorists could share the available space. Recent regional bicycle maps produced by the State of Illinois Department of Transportation have used a similar approach but have split the state into smaller districts. Such maps allow touring bicyclists to choose their own routes through a given area.
Meanwhile, urban bike maps were going through changes too. Beginning with the early Boston Map (mid to late '70s), maps began to give users a sense of the terrain; they were more like maps and less like charts that simply showed bike facilities. This brought things roughly back full circle to the approach common in the late 1800's; once again local area bike maps were becoming navigational tools that bicyclists could use to get somewhere.
Yet the Boston Bike Map was still basically a route map dropped onto a detailed U.S.G.S. base. There was no street index. Many streets were not named. The contour lines significantly reduced the map's legibility. Even so, the Boston Bike Map was one of the best bicycle maps of its era. More recent versions are quite usable, with toned-down contour lines and traffic riding tips on the back.
In the late '70s, the Portland (Oregon) Bicycle Program produced a map that took things further on a number of fronts. First, it was a "suitability" map. Rather than showing a selected few routes, this map showed all the streets and gave them color-coded ratings. "Green" streets were neighborhood roads and were not particularly suited to cross-town rides. "Yellow" streets were good quiet connectors. "Orange" streets were pretty good but with more traffic. "Red" streets were very busy and "Purple" streets were urban interstates, from which bicyclists were banned. Cyclists could choose their routes according to their destinations and their traffic preferences.
Before the Portland Bike Map, most urban efforts showed routes, whether official or suggested. After the Portland Bike Map, many rated the roads in some way. Some have taken a hybrid approach, showing a network of rated routes. The Dayton, Ohio, and Eugene, Oregon, maps of the early 1980s are examples. In one way or another, almost all urban bike map projects in the US have been affected by Portland's early work.
The back of the Portland map included a series of international style graphics which showed riding tips. These have become tremendously popular with other map makers and have appeared on most urban bike maps produced since. Even today, map producers still include some version of Portland's safety graphics. [I've personally never liked them but appear to be in a distinct minority!]
Another area where the Portland Map led the way was in the use of plastic stock instead of paper. The project team chose DuPont's Tyvek, a spun woven plastic used in Express Mail envelopes, disposable hospital gowns, and many other products. Tyvek was chosen for its resistance to wear & tear and for its waterproof qualities.
A number of more recent maps (Spokane's, Brooklyn's and the modern Bikecentennial maps, for example) have been printed on Tyvek or one of its competitors like Kemdura. However, as many, if not more, have been printed on some form of paper. The cost of the plastic has held many agencies and groups back since it can double or triple printing costs. Part of the problem is that, since ink can't soak into the plastic, it must dry on the surface and, as a result, must be handled very differently than one would most paper print jobs.
Bikecentennial also found an interesting problem with the plastic maps; the particular ink that they used in their early work on plastic was soluble when brought into contact with certain types of mosquito repellant. Some touring cyclists learned this the hard way as they went over the next day's route while dousing themselves with bug juice!
Drawbacks of the Portland map include (again) its lack of a street index and also a rather poor choice of street colors. The "Green Streets" tend to dominate the map, even though they, by definition, are unimportant. The "Yellow Streets." which are defined as the easiest to ride, are the hardest to find among the greens, reds and purples.
More recent maps have solved these problems. The Spokane, Washington, bicycle map, for example, left color off the neighborhood streets (Portland's "Green Streets"). Unfortunately, they chose a bold blue for the base, which is almost as effective in hiding information. Some producers learned the hard way that certain shades of reds and greens are very hard to distinguish for someone with red/green color blindness. The producers of Missoula's bicycle map of the mid-1980s got caught in this trap but they were far from alone. [I was project manager on this one, by the way, and Bob Perrier was the cartographer.]
Street rating schemes have also varied widely since Portland's work. Some rate the streets on a "perceived hazard" basis. Some identify "dangerous" locations with circles or other marks. Some maps base their ratings on motor vehicle traffic volumes and road geometrics. Others base ratings on the perceptions of volunteer street evaluators.
When one considers the purpose of the latest generation of urban bike maps, it's clear that navigation is more important than it used to be. Features like North arrows, street indexes, and locational grids, listings of popular destinations, scales, isochronal lines, and chevrons on hills are becoming more common. Providing usable information seems to be the focus.
Most of these maps, however, seem geared towards the longer-distance bicycle commuter, someone who wants to ride five or ten miles on a trip. (Dayton's map series is an exception.) Scale is often such that a ride across town is easier to plot than a 1/2 mile trip to the neighborhood park. A currently unanswered question is whether such an approach will encourage a significant amount of bicycle use. (To my knowledge, no one has done such an evaluation.) I sometimes wonder if a new approach to bicycle mapping might have some validity--an approach that zooms in on parts of the community and shows more detail to entice the casual rider to give cycling a try.
In the 1980's, advances in microcomputer technology -- both hardware and software -- created new opportunities for map producers. While some relied upon computer-aided drafting (CAD) packages like AutoCAD, others used products from a new category of PostScript-based illustration programs like Freehand or Illustrator.
Illustration programs were built upon a device-independent page description language (PostScript) which allowed the user to output map masters at relatively high resolution. For example, the Wilmington and Durham, North Carolina bike maps were produced in the early 1990s using Aldus Freehand software (now published by Macromedia) with negative output being generated by large format imagesetters; resolution for each one was in the 1200dpi range. The benefit of this approach is the ability to use sophisticated ranges and gradations of color tints and to "set" type in a variety of faces and sizes. Output resolutions in the range of 1200 to 2400dpi, allows one to produce much more professional-looking products.
By contrast, CAD software has tended to produce more amaturish-looking maps. Instead of being able to pick between a wide variety of type styles and sizes, for example, one generally could choose between a few clunky faces -- often called simply "Serif" or "San Serif" -- in a few common sizes. Screen tints typically were coarse in the extreme. When output from a pen-type plotter, they resembled more a child's attempt to stipple than a professional effort to create tints. And curvilinear lines were generated by producing a jumpy series of short straight lines, rather than one long smooth mathematically-generated curve.
While CAD software has historically been rather crude as a publication tool, it has had the advantage of having a built-in dimensioning system and a stronger relationship to the "real world" than has illustration software. And it had the advantage of being tied to database support. As time goes on and CAD software becomes more graphically sophisticated, these advantages will make more and more of a difference. Some recently produced CAD maps have looked remarkably good.
Recently, some map producers (e.g., the City of Seattle and the State of Wisconsin) have gone to a Geographic Information System (GIS) approach. The benefit of such an approach varies with the level of information an agency has in its related databases. If such data as roadway and lane widths, traffic volumes, and traffic speeds are already included, it would be relatively easy to use GIS to rate a community's streets or a state's highways. And, while some of the resulting map products look crude by comparison to those produced with high-end illustration software, the differences are shrinking and the advantages of GIS are becoming more compelling.
One additional reason for the growing importance of GIS (and, to some
extent, CAD) in bicycle mapping is the expanding emphasis being given to
the six "Management and Monitoring" systems, under the Intermodal
Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA). If agencies are already
collecting the data on the road system required for these planning tools,
the possibility of easy updating for future map editions becomes very real.
This is an approach being used by the State of Wisconsin.