Sitting near an eight-level tower of enchilada sauce cans in his University of Minnesota office (he really likes enchilada sauce), graduate researcher and avid cyclist Reid Priedhorsky browses an online map at Cyclopath.org, searching for a gap between a street and a bike path on the U's East Bank.
He knew, from riding there, what the map didn't.
A click. A drag. "These actually connect," said Priedhorsky, showing how easy it is to fix a "hole" in the map.
When the Cyclopath "geowiki" goes public in August, cyclists will be able to edit information (that's the "wiki") on a digital map (the "geo"), thereby building better routes from Point A to Point B and beyond. Cyclopath.org will be the world's first geowiki of its kind, but it isn't trying to attract millions of users or make money. Its benefits are local.
Some road information, like daily traffic volume, already is easily available from city governments. But Cyclopath will give riders super-local information, such as where to avoid pothole-riddled patches and narrow shoulders and whether a route might get dicey because of aggressive-driver flare-ups.
It's the kind of spokes-to-the-street information that cyclists crave. Riders can rate road conditions block by block, enter text descriptions, pinpoint interesting places and fix faulty map data throughout the seven-county metro area. Then Cyclopath crunches the information and returns personalized routes based on a "bikeability" rating.
"There are lots of bike maps out there, and I think each of them have significant failings," Priedhorsky said. "Who knows where cyclists can go? Well, cyclists do, and they know better than anybody else."
Around the dead-end guardrail, over the train tracks, and across the brown scar worn into the grass -- routes like this one used by cyclists on N. Chatsworth Street in St. Paul, won't appear in other routing systems. They will in Cyclopath, if cyclists add them.
