Chapter 9. Digital Infrastructure
For a map to evolve, it needs a publishing mechanism that’s up to the task of illuminating a bike network years before it’s formalized.
Once a city identifies its Best Available Network, the next step is to use digital infrastructure to light it up so people can go use it now. The ramifications are incredible: within six months, any city can have a complete, navigable bike network.
From the State Capitol to the world-famous Red Rocks Amphitheatre, you can route comfortably between any two points in Denver using the Low-Stress Denver Bike Map.
Digital infrastructure, like what we’ve built at Bike Streets, is a set of purpose-built tools that make it easy for cities to:
Define their Best Available Network.
Publish it to web and mobile in a user-friendly format.
Provide high-quality turn-by-turn directions that heavily favor the Best Available Network.
Collect feedback, understand usage, and identify network gaps through anonymized data.
Digital infrastructure makes it possible for a city to serve up a Best Available Network immediately and inexpensively. As such, it has a disproportionately high return on investment.
It’s not good enough to publish a paper map every 4-5 years because it limits our ability to evolve the network and it’s not how people use maps these days.
It’s not good enough to have a low-resolution PDF because they don’t show the detail people need and it’s hard to have a useful PDF with you on the go.
It’s not good enough to publish the ArcGIS maps we use for planning because they’re complex, enterprise tools that aren’t designed for end users and don’t have mobile routing.
And it’s not good enough to toss the data over to Google Maps to help people navigate. Cities have been burned by Google for long enough to know that just because we spend years of our lives building a bike facility doesn’t mean that Google will actually route on it.
A classic Google bike route. A chill mix of real bike infrastructure (Esplanade and 16th) and giant arterial streets (17th.)
In any individual location where you pour it, concrete costs a lot. By contrast, we can deploy digital infrastructure to cover an entire city and reach every person there for pennies on the dollar. Moreover, it’s in a form factor that people understand intuitively: it’s on our phones. When we drive, we get great turn-by-turn directions. People on bikes deserve the same – and need it given that we haven’t yet installed signs and pavement markings on all the routes on our Best Available Network.