Author Archives: Mike Foster

A Better Bike Map: Reimagining Your Design

Creating a map geared towards bike transportation is a challenging task, but a relevant one. With an urbanizing, mobile population and a growing need to find fast, efficient, and cheap alternatives to automobile transportation, effective communication of bicycle routes and associated bicycle-friendly infrastructure is becoming more important. The major problem is that most bike maps, due to the nature of their content, easily get crowded, cluttered, and hard to read. This requires a paradigm shift, and finding where the happy medium of effective content and supplemental information exists. This post is the first in a series that will discuss what cartographic characteristics make an effective bike map. We will ask and attempt to answer a number of questions, and then provide a high level survey on the state of bike maps while suggesting some optimal solutions.

On the vast spectrum of viable transportation choices, a bicycle is one of the few options that is not a motorized vehicle but still allows for a large amount of personal mobility and freedom. Less intrusive than a scooter or moped, more practical than a skateboard or rollerblades, a bike fits somewhere in the vicinity of half car/half pedestrian. A bicyclist can go just about anywhere with only a handful of limited restrictions, but can also effectively flow with automobile traffic down major roads, and when doing so must follow the rules of the road (Ever gotten pulled over for running a red light on a bike?). But a bike is not a car, and the flexible nature of biking and lack of exclusive bicycle infrastructure in most urban areas make creating an effective bike map a challenging task that remains open to much interpretation and subjectivity. You can see this in the handful of bike maps in the illustration below, where as opposed to a traditional road map, it becomes very hard to intuitively distinguish what each feature is.

citysamples-01So this begs a number of questions. Does a holy grail for how to create the “perfect” bike map exist? What kinds of wayfinding tools can address this and direct bikers towards efficient and safe navigable routes? With the large amount of interpretation, subjectivity, and non-exclusive use bicycle infrastructure, what criteria can be defined that will refine content and make the ideal bike map?

From a design perspective the best way to address these questions is to simplify them, and of course ask a few more. What is important to a cyclist? What do they need to navigate? What features on a map are necessary to facilitate the most efficient bike transport? Where are they trying to go? Are riders commuters or recreational? The following are three important considerations in bike map design that help answer these questions, each important in its own right. They include knowing your community and its infrastructure, rethinking your design hierarchy, and awareness of technologies that might provide the most effective ways to convey your map and its content to the user.

1. Know your community and it’s infrastructure

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Midtown Greenway “Bike Highway” – Minneapolis

Perhaps the most important component of effective bike map design is knowing your local community. Specifically, knowledge on the extent, location, and quality of the physical bicycle infrastructure in the region, along with familiarity on the users of that infrastructure (commuters? recreation? both?). Spatial data on bike routes and trails, if it exists, is rarely kept in a single central location and is often maintained by a number of different organizations, ranging from local park board websites to state natural resources offices. Collecting it and customizing it to your needs and the needs of the cycling community is not a simple task. Physical bicycle infrastructure can include grade-separated routes, off-street bike trails, on-street bike lanes, designating cycling streets, and bike boulevards. In addition to these features, the designer must be also be aware of features that may not be clearly distinguished in existing spatial dataset. Determination of other bicycle-centric features, such as service stops, bike shops, and parking locations, will require some subjective distilling of information from existing geographic data. To complicate things a bit more, many cities around the world are diligently investing in bike infrastructure and facilities are changing at a rapid pace. Ensure the map is easy to update, and note where new and future bike infrastructure exists or is under construction.

2. Redefine your visual hierarchy

Portland, OR - Lesser important roads de-emphasized, but color scheme still unclear.

Portland, OR – Lesser important roads de-emphasized, but color scheme still unclear.

Bikes are not cars. A biker does not want to be riding down a major thoroughfare, nor does the rider want to be biking in areas with many natural, physical obstacles that may be irrelevant to those in a car. This requires reimagining your city and viewing it from the paradigm as if the major car-centric features are not there, or exist as notable landmarks and navigation points rather than a network of routes. Certain features that are important on a road map lose importance, for example, you cannot bike down an interstate. The interstate however will likely remain an important feature to include as it will give your readers context and a benchmark for navigation. Redefining the cartographic hierarchy will perhaps radically change the appearance of maps of the region, as different features than are normally called out are made to look more important, and defining features on other maps are given lesser emphasis. Krygier and Wood provide a well written summary of intellectual and visual hierarchy here.

3. Determine the map capabilities and means of distribution

Cyclopath: OpenStreetMap for Biking

Cyclopath: OpenStreetMap for Biking

Also important is the means by which the user consumes the map, for example, a cyclist likely won’t use a map that only works effectively on his desktop computer at the office. This of course makes either mobile device based maps or paper maps the optimal means of conveyance. It must be considered that most bikes don’t have on-board navigation nor will they using their cell phones while they ride (I’ve tried, doesn’t work out well…), but many users will still have cell phones with them or have backpacks or pouches for clean, clear paper maps. The user won’t have constant access, but instead require sporadic access on demand. Turn by turn navigation is an interesting topic here, and some mapping giants have attempted this (see Google maps). They have had varying success, due to scarce standardized data and the lack of addressing a true means to reach the rider while he/she is biking. As mentioned above, making the map easy to make changes and update is important, as data changes rapidly as infrastructure grows and changes. One interesting attempt to address this, as well as collect an incredible amount of data, is community sourced biking mapping, a method used in projects like Cyclopath, which could be viewed as an OpenStreetMap exclusively for biking. Compare and contrast it to the Google bike maps.

There are a growing number of resources on bike maps out there, and most cities now maintain, or plan to maintain, bike maps for commuters and recreational riders. This post is the first of a short series on creating effective maps for bike transportation that will focus on design criteria and methods of a good bike map, survey, evaluate, and categorize a selection of bike maps, discussing what works and what doesn’t, and finally outline the creation of a new but perhaps familiar style of bike map from concept to completion.

The Minneapolis Bike Freeway System - (c)2013 Graphicarto

A snapshot of The Minneapolis Bike Freeway System map – (c)2013 Graphicarto

Happy Mapping,

-Mike

Mapping Urban Growth: A Cartoanalysis

randMcNallyA catalog of maps, large or small, is a treasure trove of information. A collection that when sitting static is still always growing and always changing. Everyday its value as a temporal benchmark of human growth and innovation increases. The map itself is a snapshot of place and data (or at least a window into the mind of the cartographer) at any given moment in time, but over time the assembling of maps can unveil an incredible subject matter timeline. Alot of cartographers and collectors have commented on this and, in fact, celebrated this.  Personally, I find historical road atlases to be particularly of note in cartographic historic analysis, and one of my favorite days of the year is when the newest annual Rand McNally road atlas is released. In the past I’ve spent hours, days, probably weeks, poring over each page, comparing new to old, observing the changes and progress of the past year. New highways completed, routes renamed, new stadiums, air force bases repurposed to civilian use, two lane roads upgraded to large expressways.

These Rand McNally atlases I speak of have changed over the years, both through design and layout (worth a whole other post in itself), but there are certain consistencies from page to page that have lasted through the years. The consistencies provide the potential for a fascinating qualitative and quantitative temporal analysis of urban progress and growth. What features come onto the map over the years? What fall off? What infrastructure is important, what is superseded?

I began by locating the newest and oldest atlases I had in my library from the annual Rand McNally series. The oldest that would work was the 1986 edition, with a nice Rodeway truck emblazoned on the cover, and the newest (that wasn’t all wrinkled up out in my car) was the 2011. They just happened to sit a quarter century from each other, perfect. With the two subject maps identified, I had to pick a subject area and outline the criteria to do so.  The most important of the criteria, the selected map extent and design style had to be largely unchanged from 1986 to 2011. Many stylistic and scale differences were implemented over the years, so the mapped extent had to be at about the same detail throughout. And finally, the mapped extent had to be a region of extensive urban growth, with many new communities, growing infrastructure, and new points of interest, such as shopping malls and airports.

i215

The subject winner: the massive metroplex of San Bernardino, Ontario, and Riverside in the beautiful San Bernardino Valley in Southern California, known colloquially as the “Inland Empire”. After some edge matching, layer mashing, georeferencing, and a small bit of rubber sheeting… the pictorial results.

sanBern_comparison-01

This first snapshot is of San Bernardino and the immediate vicinity.  Notable changes include the establishment of San Bernardino International Airport on the old Norton Air Force Base grounds, and the massive growth and establishment of community assets (ballparks, shopping centers, civic centers) near the large interchange at Interstate 10 and Interstate 215.  Also noticeable is the completion of the CA-210 Loop around the north and east of the city.  Population of San Bernardino in 1986: 140,000 – Population of San Bernardino in 2011: 205,000

moreno_comparison-01

This second snapshot is Moreno Valley, California, or simply known as Sunnymead in 1986.  This is one of the most extreme examples of urban growth and suburban sprawl in the entire United States during this time.  Moreno Valley was incorporated in 1984, and grew by 70,000 people in the 1980s alone.  The arterial roads remain the same, but quite noticeable are the upgrade of Interstate 215 to freeway standards and the establishment of many community resources, parks, hospitals and centers. Population of Moreno Valley in 1986: 40,000 – Population of Moreno Valley in 2011: 195,000

i15_comparison-01

A third snapshot focuses on the Interstate 15 freeway corridor.  Notable is the establishment of Interstate 15 south of Mira Loma, and superseding of Temp 15 (Hamner Avenue) along that stretch.

Any conclusions or theories drawn are clearly illustrative, but the exploration in itself is engaging and revealing.  A more thorough time series over the 25 year period, maybe a snapshot every two years, would be a fascinating addition, and reveal individual years of rapid growth, precise establishment of points of interest and civic features, and interesting regions of urban expansion (or lack thereof).

Of course, I only picked out three notable areas among many, the growth of the entire region is remarkable. Explore the map yourself!

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(A Graphicarto/Mapbox/QGIS Creation)

Happy Mapping,

-Mike

PS I highly encourage anyone to go lose themselves for a day in David Rumsey’s vast historical collection, you won’t regret it.