Reading a network map for paved cycling route add-on stops

Adding a paved route to a longer journey is easier than adding a trail, because paved routes usually run where people already are. The difficulty is choosing a segment that works on its own rather than a fragment of something that only makes sense end to end.

What to take away

Read the map for what it hides

Cities publish bicycle network maps, and how they are drawn is itself a design choice. FHWA's bike network mapping idea book collects the approaches agencies use, and New York City, Chicago and Seattle all publish their own city maps online.

When you have no city map in hand, three tools fill part of the gap: the cycling layer in Google Maps, the heatmap in Strava and the route planner in Ride with GPS. None of them is a network map, but each shows where people ride.

For travelers, different maps encode different things: some show facility type, some show comfort level, and some mark every street.

Before trusting a map, find its legend and work out which of those three it is. A map that shows only facility type will make a painted stripe beside heavy traffic look identical to a protected lane.

The official NYC Bike Map from the city's Department of Transportation is a facility-type map, and its legend is worth decoding. It separates protected bike lanes, conventional bike lanes, shared lanes, greenways and bike boulevards. For an add-on, protected lanes and greenways are the classes to string together; a shared lane means riding in the traffic stream. The web map also marks Citi Bike stations, bike shops and rental businesses, which are the practical stops at either end of a segment. The city warns that it may not reflect construction or temporary facilities, so it shows the network, not today's conditions.

Maps built around comfort or stress level are the most useful for a visitor, because they answer the question a stranger actually has: will this feel all right on an unfamiliar bicycle in traffic I do not know? The usual scale behind them is Level of Traffic Stress, which grades a link from 1, comfortable for most riders, to 4, for the confident few.

PeopleForBikes' Bicycle Network Analysis applies that scale to whole city networks and publishes a comfort score for most large US cities. Where a city publishes its own comfort map, use it in preference to the standard network map, even if it shows fewer routes.

Boston is a good example of such a map. The city's Bicycle Level of Traffic Stress map gives a score to each street segment in the city, and the score measures the traffic stress bicyclists experience on that road. For a visitor choosing an add-on, that is exactly the layer to read: it also identifies segments with unacceptably high traffic stress, which are the joins to avoid.

Look for connections, not lines

The failure of most urban bicycle networks is not the segments. It is the joins. FHWA's report Achieving Multimodal Networks: Applying Design Flexibility and Reducing Conflicts addresses applying design flexibility and reducing conflicts, which is the language agencies use for exactly this problem: pieces that exist but do not meet.

For an add-on ride, that means checking the two ends and the middle. A segment that begins at a station and finishes at a park is worth riding. A segment that begins at a highway interchange is not, however good the surface is.

A real join shows what to check. In Georgetown, Washington, D.C., the Capital Crescent Trail meets the C&O Canal Towpath near milepost 1.1, about a mile from where the towpath begins at mile 0 near 29th St NW. The National Park Service lists that junction on its towpath conditions page, and at times it carries a work alert with a local detour near the Potomac Aqueduct. That is the pattern: the join is where the plan needs a current check, not the lines either side of it.

Segments that work as add-ons

These shapes are not hypothetical. The Hudson River Greenway in New York City is the waterfront case: continuous, separated from traffic and joinable in several places. Chicago's Lakefront Trail does the same job on Lake Michigan, and the Midtown Greenway in Minneapolis threads the city on a former rail corridor and links to longer trails.

New York's transportation department also publishes self-guided rides that work as ready-made add-ons, each with a named start, a named finish and a length. Grand Army Plaza to Green-Wood Cemetery is 2.4 miles, the Bronx River Greenway ride is 2.8 miles and Washington Bridge to High Bridge is 4.1 miles. Prospect Park to Brighton Beach runs 9 miles, close to the upper end of the two-hour rule below.

Keep it to two hours

An add-on that takes longer than two hours stops being an addition. It needs a meal, a change of clothes and a recovery period, and at that point it is competing with the rest of the journey rather than fitting inside it.

Choose by the ends, not by the middle. The criteria for judging the route itself are in comparing paved cycling routes, and the same add-on logic applies to rail trail corridors.

Common questions