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

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 1.5 – 21 February 2025 – is now available on github, as is MEGAMAP 1.5.

With this version, the Greater Northshore Map has adopted our MEGAMAP’s former Empty Quarter, previously a basically empty paste-in of King County Regional Trails. It is now a peer map section with Greater Northshore proper, City of Seattle, and 2 Line Eastside Bike Connector.

There may not be a lot down there, but what’s down there is now properly mapped and included.

Additions and changes since 1.4.6:

• ALL OF NEWCASTLE, as far as I know. Thanks to Kerry Sullivan (City of Newcastle) for help on unpublished but completed new May Creek Park Drive bike lanes
• NORTHERNMOST RENTON, including substantial upgrades to Lake Washington Loop route markings, particularly street names for the chunk where it’s just bike lanes
• New-to-me bike lanes around 100th Ave W. in Edmonds, now mapped
• Upgrade to 15th Avenue S bike lanes in the Seattle map – they now have physical separation. There’s a warning flag because they’re still intermittently being worked on a little? But as far as I can tell they are generally open.

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 1.4.6 – 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! ^_^

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map 1.4.2 – 7 October 2024 – is now available on github, as is MEGAMAP 1.4.2 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.

This is a surprise snap release due to a month-long construction closure of Sammamish River Trail through downtown Bothell, a major commuter route. There IS A DETOUR, and it is appropriately signed, but since this is a big closure it should be flagged on the map.

Also, some of the small bike parking icons were too small, so I have made them larger, and threw in a couple of other small cosmetic improvements mostly involving text.

If you enjoy these maps and feel like throwing some change at the tip jar, here’s my patreon. 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. ^_^

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

It’s another release of the Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map!

The larger-scale full-Lake-Washington-Loop MEGAMAP combined bike map also got updated, of course.

This is a minor update, adding:

• A little newly-built bike lane extension in Kenmore
• A bike shop I found sandwiched between the two legs of the East Rail Trail switchback (Eastside Ski & Sport)
• Smaller QR codes in the lower corners because what was I thinking lol
• Minor adjustments and corrections no one but me will ever notice

I also added a contact link to the front page of the github repo. It points to a post I made here, and people can leave comments as they like.

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…and it didn’t work out, mostly because not to put too fine a point on it but the Community Transit bike maps for Snohomish County are not good. I have fundamental issues with how their legend is defined but that’s only part of it – even going by the letter of their bad-idea legend, it’s often very wrong in bad ways.

Which is a damn shame because 1) it would’ve been glorious and 2) it would’ve been nice to have a bike map that goes all the way to Skagit County, I mean damn. But I’m not going to put something out that leads people into danger like that, I don’t care if it is official.

So I pulled the bottom two kilometres (roughly) off the bottom of their county map using SNOGIS and brought my OWN map. With my OWN legends. And heat maps!

I’m not posting them to the official site yet, these are betas. I’ve got reduced-size versions on Amazon but they lose a lot of resolution due to their sizes. Still, if you want to get the general idea:

• Greater Northshore
• MEGAMAP

Genuinely curious about thoughts – particularly if you’re in southern Snohomish County, in which case I need your BRAIN. Or the contents thereof, that would do.

I mean, there are two important and very real separated trails heading up there, one of which I’ve explored lately though only in part, the other of which I had no idea went so far. I think it’s important to have visibility on those. They both go places that matter – Interurban goes all the way to Everett and does so via Alderwood Mall, and North Creek goes all the way up to the core of Canyon Park, a big employment area for Snohomish County and Bothell.

Plus, for people who live on the very upper border of North King County, it seems reasonable to me that they’d want some north-facing data too.

It does make the maps even bigger, though. I mean… sure does. lol

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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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Just because King County doesn’t do a detailed bike map anymore doesn’t mean they aren’t still doing their regional trails map

WHICH THEY ARE

And I can USE THAT if I don’t have anything ELSE. And since even King County Regional has the East Rail Trail South, that not only lets me use all of Seattle but gives me a full Mercer Island and a complete Lake Washington Loop.

MEGAMAP GROWS EVER MORE POWERFUL

RC 1, right here.

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New release dropped at the usual place; click on “Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map” to get it. Version 1.2 Late May, dataset 1.1 rev 4.

I also did a bit of a re-org of the github project that I’ll complete once I’ve got MEGAMAP up to version 1.2. This will make the top-level links always stay the same instead of changing every time I release a new version. Old map versions will be in the “Older Map Versions” directory, and those will have distinct names.

WHAT’S COMING UP: MEGAMAP 1.2, of course, but after that – there’s construction underway in Shoreline right now which will add at least a little bike infrastructure over I-5 at NE 145th street. Also in Shoreline, I know that 5th Ave NE at NE 185th is about to have some additional improvements come online but I don’t know the exact details. I’ll slip all that in when it’s finished; for NE 145th, that’ll likely be August or September. I know of multiple projects in early stages in Kenmore, but those won’t actually exist physically until I think 2026.

If there’s anything in the map range that you know about and I don’t, please tell me!

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