| Hi! Nathaniel and John from Mapzen here. We thought a lot about the colors for the new bike map. Green is pretty universal for trails and paths where bicycles are protected from cars. But colors are less standardized for places where bicycles share the road with cars – bike lanes, streets with "sharrows", and signed bike routes. For this first version of the bike map we focused on creating a "warm" map that complements the basemap and invites the reader to spring into exploring the bike-friendly ways tagged in OpenStreetMap, the community mapping wiki. While red draws the eye and is a warning color, we found that it overwhelmed the map in most cities when used for the least safe routes. If you want to experiment with colors, you can do so in Tangram! Instructions are at the bottom of the post. Please let us know what you come up with. While OpenStreetMap's tags are a great starting point, they aren't a perfect proxy for safety. We're working on ways to effectively mark greenways, green waves (timed lights), `living streets`, or even buffered bike lanes. Seattle is quite well tagged in this regard, and we're working to improve San Francisco. What will help most is tagging important streets into a `route relation` in OpenStreetMap (and of course getting your city and state government to build more protected bike lanes and neighbourhood bike routes). This map is a first step, and your feedback will help make the next version even better. Thanks! |