Timur, a relatively new blogger at LA Bike Rides, is looking for your help to build a new bike map for Los Angeles. Using Google's map making program to design a bike map isn't a new idea, the City of Boston used it to help design their Bike Master Plan and locally the City of Santa Monica has their map of bike infrastructure online as well.
However, Timur wants a map made by riders, not by government, to show us where people bike and what routes we, the cyclists, find to be safest. He explains:
What I’m trying to get at is the way in which there’s no one placefor LA cyclists to compile their maps. If all the cyclists in the city- and there are a lot of cyclists - put some time and effort intocompiling their maps in a single place, it might make the process ofriding in this city a lot less daunting. When I started riding here -only a really short time ago, really - I had a lot to learn. I’vefigured out some routes that work for me, but I still have a lot leftto do.
With all that in mind, I want to point people to a very worth cause: Google Maps ‘Bike There’ is a website organized around the effort to convince Google to work in bike routes into their mapping software.
So far, the only routes are ones put up by Timor and the Santa Monice bike routes. However, I have faith that with a little help from regular Streetsblog readers we can help flesh that map out a little more. To see Timur's map and make some additions, click here.
