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.

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.

I can't speak for other clubs, but for my club 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?

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/inde...d=66&Itemid=73

My club's maps are visible to the public.

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

+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:

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

top secret
 

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?

*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.

I love Bikely

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.

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?