The Chron has a request about bicycle trails.
Unfortunately, navigating via bicycle can sometimes be a difficult feat for people unfamiliar with these neighborhoods – especially downtown. While the central business district’s grid of one-way streets is easy enough, the bicycle routes for getting out of downtown are less obvious.
The ideal solution would be clearly marked signs and designated bicycle paths, but that will take time and money. Until then, the city could make sure that the maps at B-cycle stations do a better job of showing how to get to key bicycle paths. And putting mini-maps on the bikes themselves will help riders traverse Houston while sticking to designated bicycle-friendly routes.
I’ll take this request a step further. There needs to be a better map of the bike trail system online. I’m sorry, but the maps on Houston Bikeways just don’t cut it. They’re all PDFs, and they may be fine as printed documents, but even zoomed in they’re hard to read and don’t have enough street detail. You can see existing bike paths on Google Maps, but you can’t see designated bike lanes on city streets, and you can’t see what paths are currently under construction. There ought to be something easier to use, and it ought to be equally usable on smartphones. Having an app that can suggest a route in the absence of dedicated trails or lanes would be awesome, too. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for.
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