This morning at the Space & Culture blog, there is an interesting post up about bicycle mapping. Apparently, Nicole Freedman, the Boston bike czar (… she bosses around the bike serfs and lives in a palace that looks like faberge eggs? No, she is “building a bike network out of nothing, in a city routinely ranked among the nation’s worst for bicycling, on a shoestring budget” according to Streetsblog) has put together a google map tool which allows Boston cyclists to submit their usual routes [link]. But unlike Bikely (which is useful), this data will be used to help plan bicycle infrastructure. I suppose the idea is to learn where people already bike, where they feel safe, where they have to go, and put in the infrastructure they need along these routes.
After a discussion with H. about bicycle infrastructure in Portland while trying to find our way home across the Steel Bridge and through the Lloyd Center/Convention Center/Rose Quarter area, I’m pretty enthusiastic about Freedman’s plan (anyone in Portland want to combine this method with byCycle?). It seems like bike lanes and bike signals are often put in where new development is occurring or in ‘key areas’ determined by, I don’t know what exactly, established dangers? In Portland, bike infrastructure contends with auto-infrastructure, bus routes, bridges, and a few kinds of rail transport. Not that it fails or anything, it’s just not that hard to turn off of a nice, friendly street and find one’s self on wet rails, or surrounded by traffic, or mysteriously far from where one intended to be (this happened to me in much worse ways when I borrowed my Aunt’s car a few months back; driving is difficult in Portland where there don’t seem to be very many large street signs and ‘right lane must turn right’ signs leap out to trap out-of-towers. I did manage to find my way eventually, so again, it’s not like it doesn’t work).
I remember once hearing that at UC Irvine, they left out many of the paths connecting buildings, waiting for ‘deer trails’ to appear in order to determine where people were going to walk before putting out paved walk ways. This has always seemed like a good idea to me; the logic of the planners and the logic of the users is not always in line. If planners can find ways to design with user0mutability in mind, or observe actual use before putting on the finishing touches, it seems that this will bring the two closer together. To that effect, here’s a link to an interesting article about ‘desire paths’ over at Shape + Colour.
Libcycle 
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