If we knew the places we plan to visit have reasonably secure and convenient bike racks, then the decision to pedal there would be an easy one. On the contrary, if there’s no good place to park the bike, we would choose (a) a different equivalent service with a better bike parking, or (b) drive a car if the said service had no substitute. Below is a list of different local maps for Bryan/College Station area, that could tell us this bit of useful information.
- Laurel’s BCS Bike Map (https://www.google.com/maps/)
- City of College Station (https://cstx.maps.arcgis.com)
- City of Bryan (https://maps.bryantx.gov/bike/)
- TAMU Bike Parking Map (https://transport.tamu.edu/parkingmap/bike/)
Laurel’s BCS Bike Map
Our friend, Laurel, took it upon herself the immense task of cataloging the bicycle racks across twin cities over the past year. She took such care as to even include the photos, to show what these racks look like in real life, along with the time of last confirmation. Shown below is the resulting interactive map.
- Different layers can be toggled on/off, such as Bike Lanes, Bike Routes, Multi-Use Paths, and Bike Parking.
- Clicking on Bike Parking spots shows more detailed info, including photos on many, as well as last confirmed date.
- If starred, this map will be available to view on your Google Maps, desktop or mobile. Follow this instruction: View your My Maps using Google Maps (support.google.com)
A static map with infrequent updates would be less helpful than a crowd-sourced one that has many eyes and hands on continuously. Laurel’s map invites users to add missing or update outdated information, by submitting this form. (https://forms.gle/yeYJQgzHhBkz9Zkd9)
City of College Station – Bike Map
City of College Station offers a similar Bicycle Map, which includes bike rack locations throughout the city, as well as bike lanes & bike routes.
Credit must be given to the city of College Station that dataset exported from their source gave a rich starting point for Laurel to build on. Especially the data for “Proposed, Planned & Funded” gives us a hopeful glimpse of better connected network.
City of Bryan – Bicycle Routes
City of Bryan also offers the map of Bicycle Routes. It serves the titled purpose, and does not yet include locations of bicycle racks.
Please leave comment below if Bryan does have more relevant data available. The motivation behind Laurel’s map was to have a consolidated map that would cover both cities and the campus, for a seamless travel across these articifial boundaries.
Texas A&M University – Bike Map
Speaking of the campus, TAMU Bike Parking Map appears inactive at the time of this writing. Perhaps it used to work at some point in the past, and is no longer maintained or offered.
Subjectively speaking, cycling on-campus is a comparatively more relaxed experience compared to off-campus. With few exceptions, almost all buildings have up-to-date, conveniently-located, and well-utilized bicycle parking. As the Sustainable Transportation team work diligently to ensure this quality service, I would encourage them should give themselves more credit by making this achievement readily visible.
What do you think about these maps? How can they be made more useful?