Old School Bike Lanes on Bike Streets?!

This week, we reached a huge milestone for the Bike Streets project: 75,000 miles ridden with the app. Thank you for riding with it and raising our collective voice for more investment in infrastructure.

We just launched a major update to the app: more conventional routes that use painted bike lanes. We’re calling these routes “More Traffic” and the original, chill Bike Streets routes “Low-Stress.”

Painted bike lanes on Bike Streets?! Isn’t the whole project built on the idea that anyone should be able to ride a bike to any destination and that painted bike lanes on arterial streets, which are not “high-comfort,” don’t qualify for the map because they’re not accessible to people of all ages and abilities?

Yes. And that’s why our routes often use unconventional, quiet neighborhood streets rather than formal unprotected bike lanes on bigger streets.

And yet, lots of people who already ride bikes and are confident on the streets know, like, and use bike lanes like this.

We want Bike Streets routing to be useful for them. And when they ride with their less confident friends and family, maybe they’ll use one of the Low-Stress routes.

We also find that Low-Stress routes, which can be indirect and unobvious, make more sense when they are shown side-by-side with More Traffic routes.

The Low-Stress route is in blue and the More Traffic route is in grey.

If you’re looking at a More Traffic route and see that it goes on Louisiana, which is a shared lane on a mid-sized street, it makes sense why a Low-Stress route would use Ogden, which is a quiet neighborhood street.

More Traffic routes are shown on the map as dashed grey lines. Since conventional bike infrastructure is notoriously disconnected, we attempt to make connections between formal bike facilities that are as comfortable as possible.

We draw the More Traffic route “network” on the map using public data, but it’s surprisingly hard to pin down the exact network. For example, Severn Place, which appears in both Low-Stress and More Traffic routes, is a well-known and highly used bike route, but even though there are bike route signs on it it’s not technically on the City of Denver’s map of current bike facilities.

So if you’re already a confident cyclist riding these routes, give it a try. And if we need to modify the public data that draws the map, please let us know.