Fifty Plus (50+) - Why are bike routes super top secret?

We've rented a beach house for a week and plan on bringing the bikes. I know I can ride the legnth of the island, but that would be boring to do all week. I do a search for local clubs, find them, but when I try to access their ride libraries I need a password. This seems to be true of most clubs. You would think they would want to share their rides, not keep them to members only.

To keep Huffys off the road?

It doesn't make a bit of sense to me. What's even dumber is when they won't release routes of charity ride routes, even though you can usually find them on GPS sites anyway.

Check out Motionbased.com. It's a site where people with Garmin GPSs upload bike routes and running routes. I'm sure you can find good ride there. I use it every time I go riding out of the area.

I suspect some clubs feel they don't want to publish their rides so "locals" won't use their super well thought out rides without the benefit of paying club dues. There are some fallacies here, particularly in that some might try their rides and decide they would be fun to do with the group. But that is my best guess as to the answer to the original question.

Have you tried the direct route of just contacting the club and asking about it? Perhaps also contact any local bike rental places or bike stores.

On the charity rides, I've contacted them a time or two with mixed success. Got the maps from one person (they were online but couldn't be downloaded for some reason), got a "same as last year only the opposite direction" on one ride, which didn't help me because I didn't go last year. In a couple of cases, I wasn't able to get a map via email but it was still posted online before the ride so I could scope it out.

We've rented a beach house for a week and plan on bringing the bikes. I know I can ride the legnth of the island, but that would be boring to do all week. I do a search for local clubs, find them, but when I try to access their ride libraries I need a password. This seems to be true of most clubs. You would think they would want to share their rides, not keep them to members only.

I can't speak for other clubs, but for my club (http://rochesterbicyclingclub.org/) it's a copyright issue with the software used to produce our maps. We are allowed to publish maps for member's use only. As much as we'd love to publish all our maps for everyone's access, if we did that, it would result in a plague of lawyers.

What we do instead is give members a CD-ROM with the mapset, and the ride leader brings extra copies to the ride for non-members.

I'd also look at MapMyRide.com- click on the find rides tab and punch in a location. You should find rides in the neighborhood.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and he'll screw up your favorite fishing hole!

Fopr what it is worth I checked all four of the clubs I've been in over the last 32 years and found half listed multiple routes for people who visit their area. My vote goes to the Denver Bicycle Touring Club and the Santa Rosa Cycling Club.

There is a club in my area that posts the routes.
Never having been on a group ride, I've thought about "being in the area" to see if I could keep up etc. without the embarrassment of failing. Just kind of act like I "happened" to be going that way for some distance.
Maybe they want to avoid the "impromptu" participants that don't sign up and therefore, aren't really governed by their rules?

I can't speak for other clubs, but for my club (http://rochesterbicyclingclub.org/) it's a copyright issue with the software used to produce our maps. We are allowed to publish maps for member's use only. As much as we'd love to publish all our maps for everyone's access, if we did that, it would result in a plague of lawyers.

What we do instead is give members a CD-ROM with the mapset, and the ride leader brings extra copies to the ride for non-members.

Maps wouldn't be needed. Only cue sheets. There is plenty of online mapping software, and with a cue sheet one only need find the start point.

Maps wouldn't be needed. Only cue sheets. There is plenty of online mapping software, and with a cue sheet one only need find the start point.

Same software, same copyright issue.

http://www.planobicycle.org/pba/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=66&Itemid=73

My club's maps are visible to the public.

We've rented a beach house for a week and plan on bringing the bikes. I know I can ride the legnth of the island, but that would be boring to do all week. I do a search for local clubs, find them, but when I try to access their ride libraries I need a password. This seems to be true of most clubs. You would think they would want to share their rides, not keep them to members only.

Hmm. I download a ride from a club website, go out on it, get hit by a car or injure myself and my bike because of the road condition, sue the club for offering such a dangerous route to the public...... nah, it's far safer to restrict the ride library to folks who have signed the usual indemnification clause in their membership application.

Hmm. I download a ride from a club website, go out on it, get hit by a car or injure myself and my bike because of the road condition, sue the club for offering such a dangerous route to the public...... nah, it's far safer to restrict the ride library to folks who have signed the usual indemnification clause in their membership application.

Excellent point

I'd also look at MapMyRide.com- click on the find rides tab and punch in a location. You should find rides in the neighborhood.

+5, thanks for the link, found several ride maps for my area, and will now add my own path ride as pay it forward:thumb:

Excellent point

I understand the MS Society is defending a suit in North Carolina because someone was killed on a MS ride. The situation isn't quite the same, but the basic idea that an organization is responsible for the safety of a bike route is the same. One more baby step towards the ultimate nanny-state......

Yeah, try to make direct contact. That should give the best results.

Various issues have been listed, but as a guy that has done a bunch of work for various organizations it just doesn't work out to put your name, your work, your services, or your product out for general public consumption.

Whether it's internal squabbles about "Why should I pay the fee if I can get the <thing> for free?" within the organization, or the inevitable Bozo Eruptions that occur when anybody on the planet can show up on your route/range/course/strip/track/field/etc, with a copy of your schedule/documents/name/rules/etc, you just choose the easy way out and control access.

It's nothing personal, but the stories I could tell...:notamused:

http://www.bikely.com/ has bike routes -- haven't used it so not sure how useful it is though

It's the same here in the Niagara Region of western ny.
You would think they'd paid some cartographer to go out and ride all these potential routes and were damned if they were going to allow any non paying person to access their 'finds'
I have the route maps from my club and should any of you folks find yourself up in the niagara frontier region (or intent on being up here) give me a shout and I'll get em to ya. (map and cue sheet and directions on how to get to and from where ever you're staying)

Perhaps it is an issue of paying for the website with club dues?

http://www.bikely.com/ has bike routes -- haven't used it so not sure how useful it is though

*extremely* useful in the Seattle area. A lot of the "favorite" club rides or organized Century rides end up here anyway...

I find www.mapmyride.com more useful personally but there seem to be more routes on bikely.

http://www.bikely.com/ has bike routes -- haven't used it so not sure how useful it is though

I love Bikely

Hmm. I download a ride from a club website, go out on it, get hit by a car or injure myself and my bike because of the road condition, sue the club for offering such a dangerous route to the public...... nah, it's far safer to restrict the ride library to folks who have signed the usual indemnification clause in their membership application.

Then I guess the people who publish books of routes don't worry about litigation. FWIW a couple of years ago we drove the bikes 2 hours from home to do a ride through scenic rolling farmlands. When we got there we found strip malls and subdivisions. Maybe we should have sued!

Seiously, I would think that club routes might have more up to date info.

Hmm. I download a ride from a club website, go out on it, get hit by a car or injure myself and my bike because of the road condition, sue the club for offering such a dangerous route to the public...... nah, it's far safer to restrict the ride library to folks who have signed the usual indemnification clause in their membership application.

I dunno... I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that a simple disclaimer (could be made interactive, requiring consent from the user before gaining access to the ride library) should do it. Also, by this logic (and I'm not disputing this, just voicing my disappointment in our ever-increasingly litigious society), one could sue his/her LBS for selling a bike on which a crash occurred. Could that really stand up in court?

I dunno... I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that a simple disclaimer (could be made interactive, requiring consent from the user before gaining access to the ride library) should do it. Also, by this logic (and I'm not disputing this, just voicing my disappointment in our ever-increasingly litigious society), one could sue his/her LBS for selling a bike on which a crash occurred. Could that really stand up in court?

In the Philadelphia suburbs, you cannot by bicycles at Goodwill stores. I was told that the stores refuse donations of bikes because they don't want the liability if someone buys a secondhand bike and gets hurt.

When I purchased bikes from my bike shop, I signed a waiver releasing them from all liability in case of an accident.

I dunno... I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that a simple disclaimer (could be made interactive, requiring consent from the user before gaining access to the ride library) should do it. Also, by this logic (and I'm not disputing this, just voicing my disappointment in our ever-increasingly litigious society), one could sue his/her LBS for selling a bike on which a crash occurred. Could that really stand up in court?

Whether it would stand up in court or not almost doesn't matter. If there are deep pockets nearby, real or imagined, there are lawyers that would file suits on contingency fees and hope to win the lottery. In the meantime you have to hire a defense or try to "settle" out of court.

The lawsuit over the lost pants (http://overlawyered.com/index.php/2007/06/the-significance-of-roy-pearson/) at the dry cleaners was in the news for a while, and The City of New York just had their suit dismissed (http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1209546333419) claiming gun manufacturers were responsible for the use of their products in illegal acts. While both suits were lost by the plaintiffs, the defendants spent baskets full of money defending themselves. Go to http://overlawyered.com/ for many examples. A recent Volkwagen (http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/07/07-40058-CV0.wpd.pdf) example pops up first. It's almost a direct answer to your bicycle scenario.

So people get scared of our screwed up tort system and do silly stuff. I really don't blame them. It's legalized extortion as far as I'm concerned.

This is the "Over 50" forum so I'll add that some of us may be "poor as a church mouse" but others have net worth well into the 7 figures. If you're Club President or Ride Director and one of these lawsuit shoppers wander into your world, don't think for a minute that they wouldn't be willing to split everything you own with some sleazy lawyer over something stupid. I'm not trying to be a scare monger, just look at what you're worth, what you are involved with, and see your favorite insurance agent about a general umbrella liability policy for somewhere around a million bucks.

That way if some crackpot gets hit by an unlicensed, uninsured motorist on the weekly ride you lead, then sues you, at least you'll have your insurance company's legal department giving back as good as you get to avoid paying out on the policy.