Bike Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh Bike Map Now ONLINE!

Come one come all.

CHECK IT OUT

RE: Pittsburgh Bike Map Now ONLINE!

click on the image

RE: Pittsburgh Bike Map Now ONLINE!

It's beautiful. Of course. We knew it would be. Can you change the color of "Cautionary Bike Routes"? Red is too grim, some yellowy green shade would be appropriate.

More important, lose the "Reported Crashes" Just drop it. Make it go away. Soon. There's no useful information in those locations, all it conveys is that cycling is dangerous.

Pretend it was never part of the online map. Pretend I never posted this message. I could try to convince why that information is not useful, but explaining is losing.

RE: Pittsburgh Bike Map Now ONLINE!

may i suggest a couple things.

#1 load things in pages, if they page is to get bigger loading all the things in a particular category is going to get unusable.

#2 user created content (make it more clear how to do this, it already seems like its possible) i think the best possible thing that could come out of this map is to somehow get a general consensus of the best route between places based on user input, that's ridiculously complicated, but it would be worth it to get safe, possibly even marked routes that are heavily traveled by cyclists in the future.

here's to dreaming

RE: Pittsburgh Bike Map Now ONLINE!

Nice work.

And I agree with Nate.

RE: Pittsburgh Bike Map Now ONLINE!

Thanks for the initial feedback. We'll definitely consider changing the colors. We couldn't do yellow like we did with the print version because of how much yellow google maps use.

As for the crashes - we think it's really useful in order to raise awareness. However, there is a possibility we could make that a separate map at some point instead of including it on this one.

RE: Pittsburgh Bike Map Now ONLINE!

Congratulations - the online map looks great. Is there an effective way to provide suggested routes and then have them shown on the map? Scott, we had talked about preference of Savannah/Peebles over East End Ave. for instance. Just wondering if there is a "sanctioned" way to suggest modifications - every 3 months? Annually? In any case, this all looks great and is a huge resource. It is much easier to refer people to a website now that I have given all of my extra maps away!

RE: Pittsburgh Bike Map Now ONLINE!

It might be a good idea to set up a mailbox (like mapsuggest@bike-pgh.org) to collect route suggestions/modifications. Having it be an open collaboration (as Mark suggests) is nifty, but could be problematic, as some people think commuting on, say, Washington Blvd., is a good idea. Different strokes for different folks, but I don't Bike Pgh wants it to appear as if their sanctioning this a Good Idea.

RE: Pittsburgh Bike Map Now ONLINE!

Actually, we already have that email set up. it's map@bike-pgh.org. Please send any comments that-a-way and we'll consider them. The routes haven't changed much at all since the original map came out, except for some corrections.

Mac, I'd like to get input from a bunch of folks in that neighborhood who bike so we can really weigh the pluses and minuses of East End vs. Peebles/Savannah. I think that's a great route suggestion, but just want to receive input from some additional folks before changing it. Nate - what are your thoughts on EE vs P/S? BTW, this goes for all the routes.

As for interactivity. It's an interesting suggestion, but depending on how it was executed it could possibly make for a messy map. Not to mention a very slow-loading map. Let's just see how this one works for folks for a while. We'll collect comments and present them to our designers for a possible update in the future (dependent of funding of course).

RE: Pittsburgh Bike Map Now ONLINE!

#1 load things in pages, if they page is to get bigger loading all the things in a particular category is going to get unusable.

mark, i didn't quite understand this suggestion. any chance you could be a bit clearer?

RE: Pittsburgh Bike Map Now ONLINE!

so the yellowish green color doesn't work. it's going to need to be orange or bright blue. any thoughts?

RE: Pittsburgh Bike Map Now ONLINE!

so the yellowish green color doesn't work. it's going to need to be orange or bright blue. any thoughts?

RE: Pittsburgh Bike Map Now ONLINE!

Orange, I think. That's not so discouraging.

There ought to be some collaborative way to talk about routes. There's this: link to google map test which I think you can't edit, but you could comment on or even copy to your own "My Maps" and improve. (Obviously I haven't put any thought into it yet, this is just a test)

Anybody know of better map-collaboration tools?

RE: Pittsburgh Bike Map Now ONLINE!

we're getting word from our designer that orange will not contrast well, just as yellow didn't nor green-yellow. it's going to have to be blue or red.

RE: Pittsburgh Bike Map Now ONLINE!

Scott is apparently posting from an echo chamber today.

:-)

RE: Pittsburgh Bike Map Now ONLINE!

ha! (ha)

RE: Pittsburgh Bike Map Now ONLINE!

Or he cloned himself to get more done, and it's gone horribly awry.

RE: Pittsburgh Bike Map Now ONLINE!

can you make the map size a function of the browser window size that would be nice. It's only taking up about 25% of my screen. Maybe a small, medium, large button set?

Somewhat unrelated, I was thinking it would be cool to track the number of miles commuted in Pittsburgh year to date. If people filled out a form 1 time that said they average X miles per day on various roads you could have the page multiply that out. If that isn't already info that you have on hand, it might be useful when trying to advocate for road funds and you could display them as most frequently commuted roads or something. Saying something like we put in 100K bike miles per year or whatever would make a nice little marketing bullet.

RE: Pittsburgh Bike Map Now ONLINE!

bd,

map size: maybe. we'll look into it.
tracking miles: we were doing this using a google spreadsheet last year, but were only getting 3 to 5 people consistently sent in their miles. I believe Bicycle Transportation Alliance in Oregon is trying to build a tool that will give folks a login/pass to input their miles and calculate car savings, calories burned (avg), and CO2 emissions savings. Not sure if they have plans to collect info on specific streets.

RE: Pittsburgh Bike Map Now ONLINE!

Oh yeah, there's no way I'd consistently log miles, but I'd do a one time thing along the lines of I commute 15 miles per day 5 days a week from April to December and let the machine do the math and make some pretty graphs and aggregate the data. Since 1% of the 300K people in Pittsburgh commute by bike and your membership goal is 1000, you get all your members to fill it out, call it a random sample, multiply by 3 and call it a day. :) I guess it assumes that number is worth something to somebody though. I'll stop derailing the topic now.