The typical streets that most people use in a car, and are often recommended to bicyclists who try to map their routes via navigation apps, are dangerous and difficult to maneuver on a bike. The city of Houston website’s ‘Bikeway Maps’ link does not work. Even the Houston Bike Plan’s map of existing bikeways in the city reflects a piecemeal, scattered map of ‘bike-friendly’ segments, not actual routes.
However, on Madeleine Pelzel’s Houston Bike Guide, the intersection Joplin was hit crossing is highlighted in dark red, signifying ‘Do not bike here’. A few streets up, a blue line indicates a safer route.
Pelzel’s guide, which has over 140,000 views, is a user-created Google map of Houston with 10 colorful layers over the city’s streets, bayous and transportation networks.
Pelzel has lived in Houston since 2014, but she spent a year working in London. While there, she began biking to work after she realized she could easily get a map of her neighborhood’s safest cycling routes from the city’s transportation department.
Pelzel was eager to continue biking when she returned to Houston, but was quickly frustrated by the lack of a comprehensive bikeways map.
“You would never give a driver a map with just a couple of disconnected lines on it, and that’s what you usually get when you look for a bike map in a city like Houston,” Pelzel said.
In 2020, she finally decided to take matters into her own hands, drawing upon her personal experience as well as that of seasoned bicyclists, who she realized were operating within their own mental maps of the city’s bikeable routes.
“Nobody had taken the time to really put together that mental map that many people do have of where you can actually bike around in our city,” Pelzel said.
As Pelzel began to draw out the routes she typically biked, she realized it would be easier to begin with mapping where not to bike in Houston, as many of her routes purposefully skirted busy thoroughfares, such as Westheimer Road.
“Those streets where you should not bike are also streets where everyone knows their names and has them in their heads,” Pelzel said. “That’s where they drive, so using those is helpful because people do understand where those are.”
I’ve long been frustrated by how hard it is to just get a map of all of the existing bike trails in Houston. I know more or less what’s in my area but it’s clunky and not always easy to tell what’s on street level and where the entrances to the off-street stuff is. I like this approach because of the way it situates itself within the existing streetscape. You have to start somewhere, and you’re most likely going somewhere, and this can tell you how to do that in as safe a manner as possible. That’s what anyone who’s on a bike, by choice or by necessity, wants. Good on Madeleine Pelzel for taking the lead on this.