Information Investigation: Seattle Bicycling

I took the opportunity of having my Summer internship downtown to investigate what kind of information sources are available for bicycle commuters. After having commuted in via bus a couple times (and twice via car) and using the sources for that (like the metro site and Google Maps) I thought I'd try something new.

Basically the information available falls into these categories:

1) Official publications

If you're trying to bike from an out-lying neighborhood into the "downtown" area of Seattle, one of your first sourced might be the Seattle Dept of Transportation's website. There's definitely a lot of information on here, but a lot of it is hard to digest for someone who's never done much "urban bicycling." Half-useful was this low-resolution map of the bike lanes around the city. In a convenient 7MB file, they shoved so much information into such a terrible layout that you're pretty much guaranteed to be misled (especially considering the map-key to the multicolored streets is available in a separate file).

For the statistics lovers out there, the site offers such interesting facts as

"Ratio of street to bike trail in Seattle: 45:1"

Hey... good to know.

Another stand-out is this guide to the new Sharrows program (Sharrows being short for "shared lane pavement markings" apparently). A program to increase the number of lanes where both bicycles and cars can operate in an effort to make confusing road symbols even more dangerous, the guide offers such useful advice as

"Follow the rules of the road as if there were no sharrows"

2) Unofficial publications

A Google search for "help Seattle bicycling" turns up over 4 million hits. If you're looking for some info on biking in general there is a lot to be had. On the other hand, if you, like me, were looking for the essentials of biking into the city you've got a lot to sift through. I never did find anything useful beyond some anecdotal advice about how not to get hit by a car, etc.

For example, veloroutes.org offers a map with weather info and allows bikers to tag it with useful, location sensitive, advice

"denny way heading east - get ready to climb some steep shit, just about all the way up to 15th ave "

There are, though, some interesting tools like bikely.com's mapping tool. Using a Google mashup, you can map your bike route, and tag it with information. Then you can share it with other people, and view similar routes. Apparently there is even a GPS-generated bike map you can use. Check my route out here.

3) Word-of-mouth

It seems historically, no matter how much printed and organized information is available, one of the most turned-to sources for any type of information are peers. In my case, some of my co-workers at my internship regularly bike into work from a similar area, so I asked them a lot of questions about routes and strategy, and I got lots of good advice.

4) Experiential

Nothing can replace learning-by-doing, and I have to admit that after I took my first full-length trip today I felt a lot more comfortable with it. Having ridden the first half last weekend, I felt much better about that part today. The second half, though, being new and unfamiliar, proved to be more stressful and at times dangerous. When moving through traffic at relatively fast speeds, its important to already have knowledge of whats coming, so you can establish expectations.

A lot of the road signage are there to help riders who are unfamiliar with the area, but unfortunately you don't see most of them until you're already doing whatever its telling you not to (such as riding in a certain lane, taking the wrong turn, etc).

Conclusion:

The importance of word of mouth and experiential information will always be a hurdle for new bikers to start commuting into Seattle. If someone isn't lucky enough to have a peer-group with good advice, or the time to feel out the route, they probably will continue to commute in whatever way they've been.

Also... biking is hard.