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

Okay, I’m calling it: RC1 is Release Version 1.2 of the MEGAMAP, the combined bike map including Greater Northshore, complete Seattle (the “complete” part of that is new), and 2 Link Eastside maps, with also a little chunk from King County Regional Trails to get us all of Lake Washington without leaving a big void presumably labelled “Here There Be Dragons, And Also Renton” as a warning.

The map be LORGE but it also be FAIRLY COMPLETE as bike maps go of Northwest King County, except ironically for the little KC-maintained section. But what that does buy you is the last section of the Lake Washington Loop. So I think it’s worth it.

Anyway, go download, hopefully this is the last update for a little bit. It should be. If I hear of new infrastructure I’ll probably slip in some quiet updates, but it’ll be less of a production – no Beta or RC releases or any of that. Just moar bieks. ^_^

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I’m calling this a preview but it’s a pretty solid version of MEGAMAP 1.2, using the 1.1 rev 5 dataset, which is the latest.

Anybody wants to look at it, it’s on my maps Github, just click on the file labelled PREVIEW MEGAMAP.

(I tried to post a preview to Mastodon but Mastodon said “uh… TOO MUCH PIXELS” so I learned something today! Really I learned a few things, including that an absolute buttload of objects across a big stack of layers gets annoying in Inkscape the same ways it does in Illustrator, and how to use Krita’s weird but effective cloning tool. So really, it was a good day for BRAIN)

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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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Now that Version 1 of everything is out and solid, I’ve been reimplementing the Greater Northshore Connector Bike Map in a vector graphics app, and also implementing a few small improvements along the way, which mostly come from seeing it in giant map form on a wall.

I’ve improved the background map image via jpg artifact removal, I’ve fixed some text that came out of KCGIS looking weird. I’ve changed from “fuzzy line” to “pattern line” for challenging trails because “fuzzy line” doesn’t read well (if at all) on paper or at certain magnifications. I’ve regularised the distance between the two thin lines that show bike lanes on both sides of streets or paths.

But the real point of this is to reimplement it in something a lot easier to maintain. Version 1 was made entirely in macOS Preview, which is kind of insane but at the same time totally worked! However, eventually, unless you want to have the document open literally forever, that gets you down to a single-plane bitmap and changes become bloody difficult mate and I’m not having that.

So the new version has all the trail lines but none of the icons or text yet. I’ve gone over it a couple of times for accuracy but I’m not the best proofer in the world – if you’re up for giving it a look yourself, here it is at high resolution. And of course here’s the current released bitmap original Version 1, for comparison.

An example of the many advantages of going to a vector-graphics package (Inkscape in this case) is that I can go ahead and move to putting in text and icons and it won’t affect my ability to make corrections in any way. So I don’t have to sit around bouncing in place waiting for corrections this time. And that’s much better.

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I HAVE NO SENSE OF PROPORTION

and also don’t know when to stop

Welcome to MEGAMAP, wherein I quickly combine my map with the other two that I know are actively maintained, 2023 Seattle and April 2024 2 Line Eastside Connector. I expected it to take about 10 minutes, instead it took like an hour and a half and involved a lot more editing than I expected. But now it’s poster-sized! About 660mm/26″ squareish but not quite square. And north isn’t perfectly consistent because all three maps have their own separate ideas about what North is, but it’s within a few degrees so doesn’t actually matter in the least.

As far as I know, and I do know, this is the largest single print-type bike map in over a decade, since King County stopped maintaining its county-wide map.

As before, it’s on my Github. Enjoy!

[ETA: Since somehow this is being found again – hi~~! – this was the very first announcement of the very first version of the MEGAMAP, and the link no longer worked. The current version goes up into the southern 2km of Snohomish County and all the way down to the end of Lake Washington, so is no longer square but is a proper poster, and the link now works again. ^_^ ]

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…but it printed it after nine or ten tries. It’s not the tiling; it’s that it doesn’t like this combination of sheet size and paper weight, I think. It wants to float above the platen and if you’re lucky you get blurriness and if you’re unlucky you get streaks of ink.

I settled for blurriness where it didn’t really matter.

This is the Release 1 of this map, btw. Assuming no last day updates, which I don’t think are coming. I think we’re done. It’s RC2 plus like one reduction in text intensity on one label, which I only did because it wasn’t consistent. No one in the world would notice except for me.

I just wanted to see what it looked like printed out full size, even if it meant tiling it across multiple sheets. There’s just something about physical maps, you know?

Really the only thing holding us up at all is where to host it. I want something where having multiple versions (and versions of versions) is easy and that made me think of Github? But a couple of people have suggested Wikimedia.

Any thoughts?

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