Leveling Up Tech For Rolling
The VAMOS plan is about more than infrastructure: it's about solving the many problems that prevent people from rolling in Denver. One aspect is to create mapping technology that will make it easy to get a delightful, low-stress bike route to any destination in Denver. A huge thanks to our software volunteers on this adventure: Isaac, Jason, Mark, Matt E, and Matt R for making it happen.
The fundamental purpose of a map is to create access. Before Magellan, sailors had to deal with the hydrological nightmare that is Cape Horn.
And before the Bike Streets Map, the best way across Skyland and Clayton was the nightmarish bike lane on MLK and 31st Ave.
But we still have a long way to go to create the kind of access people have come to expect from modern maps. Paper maps, web-based maps, and even our simple v1.0 iPhone and Android apps, which show your location on the Bike Streets Map, are missing a critical feature that has become fundamental to going places: custom, turn-by-turn routing.
But Google Maps has bicycle directions! Sure, if riding on Colfax to get from City Park to Wash Park is an acceptable route for you. Again, a quality map equals access. A bad map and you find yourself riding with your kids on their Strider bikes on Denver's version of Cape Horn.
The reality is that bike routing in 2023 remains in a primitive state -- especially if our goal is to create access for people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds. Here's a fun route on Google Maps that includes an adventure on Colorado Blvd. You can see how someone who’s considering rolling might take a look at Google Maps, become deflated, and hop into their Humvee.
Doesn't the City publish a map? Kind of. The most recent edition is a low-res PDF from 2019. You can also dig into their ArcGIS project, but that's more of a planning tool than user-friendly technology. (If you want to go down a rabbit hole, you can consider the government's role as a map publisher. We'll pass for now.)
We're determined to solve the routing problem. And we're getting close. We're building a custom routing engine that one day (soon, hopefully) will be in our mobile apps.
This past week, we had a major breakthrough and generated the first routes that line up well with the Bike Streets Map. This route to watch a movie at Alamo Drafthouse uses the routes we call REVEL and UNION and provides an alternative on REVEL and SONNET.
One of the next steps will be to run our Un-Real Time Routing requests through the system, see how they line up, and refine the routing algorithm accordingly.
In many tech projects, what feels like 80% of the way to Valhalla often ends up being 20%, so we're not making any promises on when this will be ready -- and it's all still volunteer work -- but we wanted you to know about it.
We also want to highlight the sanguine view that it's possible to identify the problems with rolling in our cities today, to not brush them under the rug, and to solve those problems. If we're going to have the city we want (and that all our urban plans say we're going to have), we have to be relentless in identifying what works and what doesn't, strengthening the good stuff, and fixing the things that aren't working.
As Steve Jobs said, "Everything around you that you call life was made up by people and you can change it...And the minute you understand that you can poke life and if you push in something will pop out the other side. That you can change it. That you can mold it. That's maybe the most important thing."
Let's push some buttons.
