Advocacy & Safety - cycling route maps?

This poll is intended to gauge the forum's opinion of bike specific cycling route maps for metropolitian areas, county cycling maps, state cycling maps etc. I spent last weekend cycling down to Portland from Seattle, and rode in Portland for four days, and took advantage of the Multnomah county bicycling guide map to help plan enjoyable rides in the greater Portland area. The assistance was invaluable, and provided much greater information than the auto-centric road map I had of the portland area.

There are quite a few of these cycling maps that I've seen and used. Hopefully many of you are familiar with them as well. These are maps showing bike routes across areas. They commonly differentiate between high and low traffic roads, show width of shoulders/no shoulders, high speed/high volume roads, "dangerous" intersections and bridge crossings, and bike lanes.

Having taken advantage of these maps there I wonder what other posters think of them, if they've used them ,and if they should be developed for other communities that don't have them yet? Do you think these types of maps are valuable as cycling aids? Should communities have these types of maps available? Would you get use out of this type of map for your area, if none is currently available?

I didn't vote in your poll, since I don't like any of the options. But yes, I would use them, but not for MY area; I'd use them for getting into and through unfamiliar areas where I might be going. In fact I have searched for such maps on-line for a few locations, hoping for suggestions how to get from point A to point B, though without much luck. There is the potential problem, of course, that what seems a nice road to one type of cyclist would be quite unacceptable to another.

The bike route maps for the Toronto area are pretty marginal. The cities of Toronto and Mississauga produce maps that show official bike routes, but there's no information about traffic volumes or surface conditions.

I would love to see a map that colour codes the roads with volume, surface and shoulder information. I've often wondered if a group of cyclists in an area could wheedle the official street plan out of a city and produce that information themselves.

The bike route maps for the Toronto area are pretty marginal. The cities of Toronto and Mississauga produce maps that show official bike routes, but there's no information about traffic volumes or surface conditions.

I would love to see a map that colour codes the roads with volume, surface and shoulder information. I've often wondered if a group of cyclists in an area could wheedle the official street plan out of a city and produce that information themselves.

I disagree - when I take my leave of the downtown core, I have found the city of Toronto Map to be useful. Basically I see it as a series of useful suggested routes that one may take - sometimes I try other routes, and find that for whatever reason, there is a better one - but usually their suggestions involve routes that I'd likely not have tried in an unfamiliar area.

Ditto for the Calgary bike route map - though I find calgary has a number of suggested bike routes that amount to a FOAD message to cyclists (roundabout, annoying, or difficult) to get them of the REAL streets of the city. However - having a map that shows all of the bridges and MUP's and suggests some good roads that one might take has been useful.

What I would like to see is prioritizing of stop signs and placing traffic lights/pedestrian crossovers on identified bike friendly streets. There are a number of ways to do this without costing a lot of money and/or generating a lot of motor traffic on the routes.

A BUG-researched bike map is a great idea - maybe along the lines of a wikipedia map.

I like maps of all kinds.

This is a map by ADOT showing the entire state of AZ:
http://www.azbikeped.org/images/map%20side%201%20(3-03-06).pdf

I only post it as it shows things Bek mentioned, shoulder widths, grades, traffic volumes. A cyclist planning a cycle trip thru the Southwest would probably find this map useful.

Al