San Francisco Bike Blog

Online PDF bicycle maps are basically unusable. They’re just too big and sluggish and you can’t find what you need in a reasonable amount of time — it’s just a total disaster. The above image is a rendering of the SFBC Bike Map at about 17% scale - give or take.

First, you usually need some PDF client software installed, which is painful in and of itself. Huge, clunky software with add-ons - who needs it? I use free, more light-weight PDF reader software when I can. When you start to zoom in on the online PDF map, you can see things crystal clear - which is the huge plus with the PDF file format - but it can really bog down your computer. This makes obtaining bicycle directions more difficult, which adds to the overall burden of getting people onto bikes. So, we need to address this.

This has nothing to do with the San Francisco Bike Map vs. the San Diego Bike Map vs. the New York City Bike Map - one may or may not be better than the others and I don’t care about that for this post - this has to do with the actual implementation technology we’re using - PDF.

I have a basic consumer laptop, and when I open the SFBC bike map, it’s because I’m really desperate for information. We now also have an SFBC Bike Map on the wall of the apartment - it’s somewhat useful, but on the wall it’s too small - I want to be able to zoom in better. [This makes me think it'd be cool to get a super-sized version of the map to put up - wonder how much that would cost?] If you have a high-powered computer, then big PDF-based bicycle maps might work fine for you, but I find them just incredibly painful to deal with.

Here is the the SFBC’s San Francisco Bike Map (pdf). It’s a great map, and up until now, there may not have been any other better ways to render this information to paper/screen, but maybe a new choice just opened up. Or, more accurately, maybe it’s existed a while, but someone finally took advantage of it and I re-awoke to the need for this type of solution.

Google Maps is a product/technology/service that I have a lot of affection for. It’s made my life better and I have a feeling it will continue to help drive all sorts of innovation and improvements to the public realm. It continues to prove itself especially useful to those of us who are particularly concerned about streetscapes. One of the main technology innovations behind Google Maps is its ability to make lots of information available in a quickly-loading, non-sluggish format. Well, not as sluggish as PDFs on my computer tend to be, anyways. A Google Map of San Francisco is embedded below:

It’s draggable, and that’s awesome. A PDF is draggable, too, but not in the incremental, ’tile’-based loading way of Google Maps that makes the Google Maps interface so much more responsive than a PDF. Google was probably not the first to offer this type of technology, but they were the first to introduce it to me and myriad other folks. Google Maps showed us that there was a lot of power in having ready, efficient access to good maps.

Google Maps Mania points us to a Google Maps-type implementation of the Washington, DC area Metro system. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty darn cool. You can drag it around, zoom in and out, etc. Below is a simple example of the initial map, and then zoomed in a bit - the image is a bit fuzzy because I shrank it to fit here:

I can think of plenty of things we could do to improve it, like offer a ‘transparency’ slider or similar, but this is a great start. I’m thinking we might be able to do the same thing with our PDF-based bicycle maps.

So, there are two parts to ‘bicycle mapping’:

1. Static maps that are very easy to use - both online and offline versions, and
2. Maps which show bicycle directions.

This is not to say that we can’t use Google Maps to make our own bike maps, or use Google Maps as potential replacements for the PDF-based maps — I just think these still have lots of limitations, and that the CASA software might be able to get us to a better place in the very near term, while still maintaining the full integrity and usefulness of the existing PDF maps - we’d just be making them even more useful.

I can’t help so much with aesthetic projects, but this one might be doable. If I make any progress on it, I’ll be sure to let you know about it. And, of course, if you’re a geek, feel free to have a go yourself and let me know what you find out.

[The 'Terrible Terrible Terrible' reference is from this.]

…Added image of WMATA system map.

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