収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

2 Line Eastside Bike Connector updated their map to include the new train stations opening today! If you’re seeing this on May 10th, you can go to the opening events!

Naturally, we’ve picked up the new version, and Greater Northshore Bike Connector and MEGAMAP 1.7 – 10 May 2025 – are now available to download.

Move Redmond have also expanded their core area further north. Online, they’ve started doing the Seattle thing where they have some infrastructure information outside their region.

I’m not including their extended area at all, and I’ve also only extended their core map very slightly further north. There are a few reasons, the biggest of which being that we have features they don’t, and I think those features are important in lower-density infrastructure areas like north Kirkland and north Redmond. Without them, Briar wouldn’t have any markings at all.

They’ve also left me with a bit of a quandary: they’ve changed their map key on me. The markings are different, now. Fortunately, only a little, but it’s still a change.

In their area, fully separate bike paths are now dark green, rather than red. Given that I specifically used their key system – before expanding upon it – for consistency, I should probably go along. But to be honest, I don’t like the change. I think it adds confusion, because before, all bike infrastructure was red. Now most is red, but some is dark green, instead.

All one colour was simpler and easier.

On the other hand, having now three different systems – two of which are only very slightly different to each other – is more confusing than having two, and I could fix that.

Any thoughts on what I should do? Should I move to theirs, despite not liking the change? I’m genuinely uncertain.

Anyway, additions and changes since 1.6.1:

• MAJOR EASTSIDE UPGRADE with the freshly dropped 2 Line Eastide Bike Connector Map. There are several updates, but the biggest are the two light rail stations opening today, 10 May 2025. If you’re reading this on the 10th, there are opening day celebrations and you can go join them.
• Notes about infrastructure continuance off-map now appear on both Greater Northshore and MEGAMAP, with the notes and arrows relocating as appropriate.
• Same for the two major directional notices to Alderwood Mall and City of Snohomish, both of which are too far north for this map.
• Addition (with reservations) of a short section of what are technically bike lanes in Woodinville. I don’t like them and have marked them as undermarked, because they are.
• Construction on NE 132nd has extended bike lanes! And made the crossing of I-405 more confusing and probably slower! But also maybe safer despite that. It’s a tradeoff, and it’s on the maps now.
• NE 116th in Redmond has extended bike lanes now, but without the added complexity of 132nd.

All permalinks continue to work.

If you enjoy these maps and feel like throwing some change at the tip jar, here’s my patreon. Patreon supports get things like pre-sliced printables of the Greater Northshore, and also the completely-uncompressed MEGAMAP, not that the .jpg has much compression in it because it doesn’t. If you have an iPhone, please use the website interface and not the app, because Apple takes 30% if you use the app. I’ll keep doing this regardless, but you know. Thank you! ^_^

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Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map 1.6 – 18 April 2025 – is now available on github, as is MEGAMAP 1.6.

Additions and changes since 1.5.1:

• Large expansion north to Lynnwood City Centre and rail station across all of SW Snohomish County
• Extension of Interurban Trail in Edmonds to 78th Place West reflecting new construction
• Improved street labelling, mostly in SW Snohomish County
• Route indicators at map edges describing past-map continuations to destinations such as UW and City of Snohomish

All permalinks continue to work.

If you enjoy these maps and feel like throwing some change at the tip jar, here’s my patreon. Patreon supports get things like pre-sliced printables of the Greater Northshore, and also the completely-uncompressed MEGAMAP, not that the .jpg has much compression in it because it doesn’t. If you have an iPhone, please use the website interface and not the app, because Apple takes 30% if you use the app. I’ll keep doing this regardless, but you know. Thank you! ^_^

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I’m finally expanding the Greater Northshore and MEGAMAP the extra mile or so into Snohomish County as I’ve been promising. This expansion gets users to Edmonds and Lynnwood Town Centre – including the light rail station – so there’s some real meaning to it. In the east, it’ll eventually be important for the expansion of the Rail Trail, too.

Sometimes, tho’, when you’re doing stuff like this, you discover something. That happened tonight.

Check out this incomplete little map section-in-progress. There’s something to infer from it:

The crossings of Highway 99 at 208th and 228th have weight. Cyclists use them, even where the infrastructure stops short of the highway. They’re okay with both.

But they don’t use 220th. That’s fine – 220th interacts badly with I-5 not much further to the east, and has no infrastructure east of Highway 99 anyway. Of course they don’t use it.

212th, on the other hand, doesn’t have those problems. Infrastructure on both sides, even if a little short on the east. No I-5 issues.

And yet, people DO NOT WANT TO CROSS there. They REALLY don’t. They want to go half a mile or more out of their way north and cross at 208th, or a mile and a half out of their way south and use 228th instead.

It’s very specific to the crossing, too. They do use the infrastructure on 212th, on both sides. It lights up on the heatmaps, nice and bright.

But they don’t leave it. They don’t cross 99. Not there. They go north. Or maybe south, but mostly north.

And I can’t for the life of me tell you why. Not from looking at the maps I have. The intersections at 212th and 208th seem much the same to me, even from streetview. Infrastructure’s a little more complete at 208th, but not all that much – what’s half a city block between friends?

And yet.

People who bike there, they know something. Something I don’t, and something I can’t see on a map or from a satellite.

Neat, eh?

I wonder what they know.

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Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map 1.4.6 – 28 January 2025 – is now available on github, as is MEGAMAP 1.4.6, a pasteup of Greater Northshore, City of Seattle, 2 Line Eastside Bike Connector, and a little bit of King County Regional Trails to get us all the way to the south end of Lake Washington.

Changes since 1.4.4:

• Addition of a “Difficult” label on Power Line Trail
• Removal of a bike store icon in Roosevelt and 84th
• Addition of fully-separated bike lane on 11th Ave NE from 47th to Ravenna, and on 12th Ave NE from Ravenna to NE 69th
• Waterfront Trail: Yesler to Union section now open
• Eastlake from Fairview to John now has separated bike lanes, with more to come

All permalinks continue to work.

If you enjoy these maps and feel like throwing some change at the tip jar, here’s my patreon. Patreon supports get things like pre-sliced printables of the Greater Northshore, and also the completely-uncompressed MEGAMAP, not that the .jpg has much compression in it because it doesn’t. If you have an iPhone, please use the website interface and not the app, because Apple takes 30% if you use the app. I’ll keep doing this regardless, but you know. Thank you! ^_^

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UPDATE RELEASE NOTICE for:

• Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map (now version 1.2.1, dataset 1.1 rev 5)
• Northwest King County MEGAMAP (also version 1.2.1, dataset 1.1 rev 5)

The bike part of the bike and sidewalk improvements on 73rd Ave NE in Kenmore are complete! There’s still a little sidewalk work to be done – the elevated sections have railings, but they’re extremely temporary. However, with the bike parts done, that’s good enough for me to show.

Also, both maps have updates to bike shop locations (deleting some in Seattle; adding some in Greater Northshore) and there’s also word correction in the MEGAMAP box.

Direct “latest map” URLs have not changed since the 1.2 release; both maps can be download from github.

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Housemate printed my map in tiles across eight sheets of 11×17 (roughly A3) paper and I cut them up and glued them together into a poster and got it hung. I’m really quite pleased with it. ^_^

I probably need a proper bike icon for Dreamwidth now – I write these in WordPress, it’s Federated so it goes to the Federation but it also cross-posts to Dreamwidth because that’s how I roll, and it still has per-post user icons which I kinda miss in general. ^_^

Anyway, you know where to find it if you want to grab the file and print your own. FedEx storefronts can print them all on one sheet so you don’t have to break it into tiles and glue it. I’m sure other places can do it too.

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I know, I know, ANOTHER MAP POST but this is a release candidate! It’s RC1 (and probably only) for Version 1.1, Dataset 1.1 rev 4 of the Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map:

Release Candidate 1!

This is actually a significant revision, because it adds an entirely new data type: demand paths, in the form of roads which completely lack bike infrastructure and yet are still used regularly by people on bikes.

I think this is worth doing for a few reasons. First, it shows you where drivers are used to seeing bikes around. That’s helpful, because if you’re trying to get somewhere without support, it shows you how other people do it, and what’s probably the least bad idea.

Secondly, it connects a lot of apparently-island-like infrastructure together. It shows you that sometimes where infrastructure stops, bikes don’t, and how to get across those gaps if you have to.

How much heatmap intensity it takes to get onto this new layer is highly dependant upon context. In unincorporated King County, for example, it’s all really obvious. Lake Forest Park, by contrast, is an absolute nightmare – all the roads are kinda the same, because all of the options are kind of equally bad. But I did my best to tell them apart – in part by figuring out whether they went anywhere in particular – and from that make intelligent choices about what to show and not show.

As always, feedback is requested. I’ll be dropping the final before the end of the week, and then after that, I’ll get on making an updated MEGAMAP. It doesn’t seem like making a new megamap would be work? But… kinda actually is!

Oh yeah, one final amusing-to-me note: there’s a section of bike lane infrastructure that Kenmore says is there, but Google says absolutely isn’t. So I biked all the way up there – to SnoHOmish County – and SUCK IT, GOOGLE, MY MAP IS RIGHT AND YOURS IS LIES. It’s absolutely there.

Pretty good quality, too. I mean, for paint. Mostly buffered, always nice and wide. Not too bad, particularly given the low traffic road.

For paint, anyway.

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What I hope is the FINAL major update for the Megamap:

I decided it was kind of rude to cut off discovery park so I widened the workspace to put it back on, and discovered that also gave me the space to add back the West Seattle bridge detail so I did that too, and a little cleanup because why not.

Anyway, it’s now wider, 722x656mm or roughly 28.5″x26″ now at intended print resolution of 300 dpi (because that’s a standard here).

I really think and hope I’m done with this version, now that I know this thing has legs I’m kinda like “whelp now time to do it over again with proper tools” so that maintenance will be easier and alignment won’t be such a bear and a half. Because it will be.

Here’s the project, and here’s the May 2024 Megamap directly. Enjoy!

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This is a link to my new Greater Northshore bike connector map, built to link the long-maintained Seattle and new Eastside 2 Line Rail connector bike maps. Since we haven’t had one and nobody else is going to connect the dots, I decided I would.

The partially-covered white map at the bottom left is Seattle’s; and the lower-down equivalent on the bottom right is the very top of the 2 Line Rail Eastside map. Everything else is this map.

If printed at 300dpi actual, the map is 24″x10.4″ or 608x264mm in size. It should fold down nicely if you’re into that sort of thing.

NEW IN RC1:

• Steepness markings, measured using Google Maps data and trigonometry, with the single- and double-chevron steepness indicators pointing uphill and scaled as per the 2 Line Eastside map.
• A couple of very small corrections

What’s not listed: trails on private property and some completely isolated islands of quasi-bike-lanes that go nowhere.

Corrections desired.

Finally, thanks to the other contributors to this map:

• Erik H on Facebook (Bothell additions)
• @[email protected] (Shoreline additions)

#BikeTooter #BikeMap #maps #Shoreline #LakeForestPark #Kenmore #Bothell #Woodinville

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Anna and I went to check out the new wetlands park down by Sammamish (a bunch of photos here) and it was really nice despite not being really grown-in yet. That’ll take a little while, since they’re going full-native-plantings on it, but it’s good, I like it. Particularly the elevated pathways that let you get out onto the peninsula between Swamp Creek and the Sammamish River.

But we stayed kind of longer than I thought we would, and since I wanted to bike to Bothell (the next town over) to buy some items I can’t get at either closer grocery and get home before it got dark, I turned on the electric assist and leaned in a bit.

Normally I don’t use the assist on this trial at all, right? But I was realising that I was pretty high up the gears and something felt a little different, and looked down to see that I was going over 20mph, which means all the assist had turned itself off, as it’s supposed to do at or around 20mph on a Class 1 ebike.

And now I know what that feels like. I think it ramps down intelligently starting at like 19.5mph. It felt very smooth. (And I’m using miles because that’s what the rules here are written in.)

I think that’s maybe the fastest I’ve gone on a mild incline. I’ve gone faster certainly downhill, but this was flat to very slightly uphill, so I’m pretty pleased with myself over that. And I was certainly surprised.

Anyway, I got to Bothell and then got back home well before dark, even if some lights were turning on, and the frozen coldpack I’d thrown into the insulated bag on the way out showed no signs of melt at all, which is really as I’d expected but it’s still nice to have it play out.

Then I got home and made another iteration of my newest object design, which is printing out now. It’s another accessory for the vertical project mounting system, but I’ll post about that later.

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