bike maps

<[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

Claire Petersky said:

Things I like about our city's bicycle map:
...
o Indicates grade on bike routes ...

How are the grades indicated, Claire?

Is that what's used? Or are there any alternatives? (Full contour
lines would likely be overkill, and unreadable by many folks.)

The Seattle, King County and Bellevue bike maps use > or < marks on the
road to indicate how steep it is. Imagine some sort of contour line
crossing the road, and a > at each contour crossing. A really steep
street is >>>>>, a not so steep street > > >. The streets
have to be a certain steepness before they even bother with the > mark.

I feel like I'm not making that much sense. See the maps on line here:
http://www.onelesscarbellevue.org/pdf/BikeMap03.pdf
http://www.metrokc.gov/kcdot/roads/planning/bicycling/bikemap2005.pdf
http://www.ci.seattle.wa.us/transportation/bikemaps/northbikemap.pdf
http://www.ci.seattle.wa.us/transportation/bikemaps/southbikemap.pdf

The Seattle one also gives more of a sense of actual elevation, using
shading -- I forgot what they call that in cartography.

As a postscript, I'll note that sunsite has cut me off from their free
newsfeed -- in fact, they did so in the middle of me writing this post.
I am either going to have to figure out how to use teranews, or beat on
the head of earthlink until their newsfeed works. Google groups is OK
as a stopgap, but is not a long-term solution.

--
Warm Regards,

Claire Petersky
Personal page: http://www.geocities.com/cpetersky/
See the books I've set free at:
http://bookcrossing.com/referral/Cpetersky

Violet Tigress said:

OCTA publishes a free bike map. You can only get one at OCTA
headquarters as far as I know- which is certainly not easy to find , as
they don' publish the address. I came across it on the OCTA site. They
don't advertise this map. Anywhere. Why not?
Like thee bus map it doesn't appear to completely reflect reality but it
looks to be adequate... especially is you happen to have a supplemental
street map.

You know, I grabbed a PDF of the Orange County map off this page
(below) a few months ago, but now it looks like the download is gone.
I wonder why that is, maybe the page is just messed up. The text
almost implies the download is there:

http://www.octa.net/bikeways.asp

There is also the excellent bikemetro site:

http://www.bikemetro.com

As a note to people in other areas, bikemetro would like to serve new
regions. Check it, and its "route finding" ability with a couple
orange county addresses. Like from Knotts Berry Farm to Diseneyland, a
very short demo:

8039 beach boulevard, buena park, ca 90620

to

1313 S. Harbor Blvd. Anaheim, CA 92803

That area doesn't have any hills, but I've been impressed by its
ability to choose routes according to the selected "hill tollerance"
and "skill level."

Tom Keats said:

In article <[email hidden]>,

Quoted message said:

Do most people need address ranges?

I figure ultimately that's what street maps are for --
to figure out how to get to 1234 Maple St, or wherever.

Yes but you have those funny street numbers that change with the blocks
do you not? Not something we have back east, not to mention some of
the naming conventions that can make one (relatively) straight street
change names 4 times in roughly 4 km. 🙂Example is from Ottawa- not
Kingston for locals.

John Kane
Kingston ON

Quoted message said:

Tom Keats said:

In article <[email hidden]>,

Quoted message said:

Do most people need address ranges?

I figure ultimately that's what street maps are for --
to figure out how to get to 1234 Maple St, or wherever.

Yes but you have those funny street numbers that change with the blocks
do you not? Not something we have back east, not to mention some of
the naming conventions that can make one (relatively) straight street
change names 4 times in roughly 4 km. 🙂Example is from Ottawa- not
Kingston for locals.

Oshawa has one of the weirdest, Oxford Street, there is a portion North
of the 401, it deadends at the highway, another portion south of the 401
, then it ends at Bloor St, then a couple of blocks South it returns,
for another piece, then shifts over a block even further down, then
loops around and twists about, finally ending near the lake.

There are lots of examples of streets that change names, I'm sure that
some cases are where you had a street that ended, then a distance
further along was another street and eventually they joined them
together, and ended up with a street with two names..... What I find
weird, is the number of crescents and confusing little bits and pieces
they seem to like to put into suburban areas these days, where the only
way to figure out how to get somewhere is with Mapquests hand holding
directions.

W

In article <[email hidden]>,

Quoted message said:

You know, I grabbed a PDF of the Orange County map off this page
(below)

It's still there. I downloaded it but it didn't do much good. My mom
went & picked up a hard copy sincce she was going that direction anyway.

http://www.risingconcepts.com/frapper/ is a google map based web page
that lets you create your own maps of locations. Ride starting
locations, members home cities, bicycle repair shops, etc.

Claire said:

The Seattle, King County and Bellevue bike maps use > or < marks on the
road to indicate how steep it is. Imagine some sort of contour line
crossing the road, and a > at each contour crossing. A really steep
street is >>>>>, a not so steep street > > >. The streets
have to be a certain steepness before they even bother with the > mark.

I feel like I'm not making that much sense. See the maps on line here:
http://www.onelesscarbellevue.org/pdf/BikeMap03.pdf
http://www.metrokc.gov/kcdot/roads/planning/bicycling/bikemap2005.pdf
http://www.ci.seattle.wa.us/transportation/bikemaps/northbikemap.pdf
http://www.ci.seattle.wa.us/transportation/bikemaps/southbikemap.pdf

The Seattle one also gives more of a sense of actual elevation, using
shading -- I forgot what they call that in cartography.

You were almost there. It's called a hillshade. The only problems with
hillshades are that they usually generated using exaggerated elevations
and do not give a true measure of slope or elevation. But they are nice
for anticipating whether you will be travelling up or down hill.

If you want to try to measure the slopes yourself, look for USGS
hillshaded quad maps. They are also sometimes found as USGS DRGs
(Digital Raster Graphics). They are made for use in a Geographic
Information System (GIS), but can be opened by just about any image
viewer.

If you want to create comprehensive maps, you might give Forestry GIS
(FGIS) a try. It will read and properly georeference the USGS maps and
you can create lines on top of the imagery to mark routes. FGIS is
completely free, not too difficult to learn, and you can download tons
of data for free.

You can find FGIS at:
http://dnr.wi.gov/org/land/forestry/GIS/Applications/FGIS/index.htm

You can also try the free USGS data viewer, dlgv32:
http://mcmcweb.er.usgs.gov/drc/dlgv32pro/index.html

You can pick up data for the GIS here:
http://seamless.usgs.gov/
http://gisdata.usgs.gov/
http://edc.usgs.gov/geodata/

-Buck