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

Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map 1.7.1 – 1 June 2025 – is now available on github, as is MEGAMAP 1.7.1.

Additions and changes since 1.7:

• Extension of bike lanes in Kenmore on 80th Ave NE up to NE 185th/186th street – this is new paint, done because they could; they also made their own city bike map;
• Refinement of intersections with streets on Interurban Trail North in Snohomish County;
• Small additions (short bike lane, shorter trails) around Totem Lake;
• Small addition (short mixed-use trail, pedestrian first but bikes permitted) in northern Woodinville at 130th/132nd;
• Addition of north bike exit from Shoreline North 1 Line station – possibly part of the Trail Under the Rail system? It’s not signed as such but it’s in the right place for it;
• Text cleanup in Redmond, replacing/moving certain street name text which gets cut off on the Greater Northshore map so that it is no longer cut off.

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.

Thank you! ^_^

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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! ^_^

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

Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map 1.4.5 – 13 December 2024 – is now available on github, as is MEGAMAP 1.4.5 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 1.4.3 (since I apparently never posted about 1.4.4 here?! so you get a double-dose):

• The full long-term remapping of Montlake Boulevard at SR-520 with the new bike/pedestrian bridge. It was supposedly going to be soft-open today, with opening ceremony tomorrow (14 December) but it’s not open yet and landscaping clearly isn’t done. I think it’s open enough for tomorrow but I suspect there will be landscaping-related closures. (MEGAMAP only)
• New Safe/Neighbourhood Greenway streets in northern Lake City (already open; Greater Northshore and MEGAMAP)
• Improved bike lanes/partial off-street lanes in Redmond on 152nd Ave NE north of NE 24th St. (already open; MEGAMAP only)
• Yet another correction to Seattle’s map showing NW 125th between Interurban and Aurora as sharrows, not bike lanes (thank you, @pruwyben@social.ridetrans.it) (Greater Northshore and MEGAMAP)
• Construction warning flag removed with the end of Burke-Gilman repaving in Bothell (Greater Northshore and MEGAMAP)

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.

So just before the pandemic, I got an eBike. People who have been following me a while know that I go on bikeposting benders sometimes, too, so here’s your heads up that that can happen lol.

I also maintain the Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map and MEGAMAP, the former a bike map of northwest King County and north Seattle, the latter a combination of maintained bike maps from difference sources that covers from south Snohomish County to the southern tip of Lake Washington. It’s Creative Commons, you can download it at full resolution and even print it if you want.

Despite my main ride being an eBike, the assist stays off most of the time. It’s on when I’ve really got to get somewhere quickly, for the giant hill home that is the reason I bought the thing, etc.

But! I’ve also been using the assist for a starter boost in busy intersections, when I’m on a car road. I’m not really going faster overall when I do this, but dang, do I get started more quickly.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to try not doing that for a little while. Mostly, I wanted to see if I could build starting power, but partly, I just wanted to see what happened.

And what happened is that automobile drivers instantly because way bigger dicks at me, and intersections got way more dangerous. Not because of the speed, but, again, because of car drivers being much bigger dicks about me being there at all.

This included two cases of people driving into oncoming lanes of traffic deciding to get around me, including one trying to then merge into me after doing so, even though when they did it I was at or close to the speed limit.

The difference was fucking stark holy shit is what I’m saying.

A few days ago I went back to using boost to get started across intersections, and it’s back to normal.

I’m thinking that something in car drivers’ brains see quick acceleration as “that’s a car” triggering the according respectful behaviour, even though they actually see a bike. And that those same people see slower acceleration as “get that fucking piece of shit off my road” and also behave accordingly, disrespectfully and dangerously, towards the bike.

This is again despite the difference in speed at the halfway point being negligible.

One woman’s playing around with the world at an intersection does not a study make, but damn, it was, as I said, a stark difference. I do wonder if bicycle messengers all figure this out too, and get a rep for it that – surprise! – turns out is as much about personal safety as getting places quickly.

I will definitely continue to use boost to launch across intersections. I can be faster out the gate than a car, and will absolutely continue to be.

Might be something to think about, either as a biker or a driver of a car.

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Now incorporating the southern mile-ish of Snohomish County! The idea was 2km but some places it’s barely over a mile. Either way, that means yes, we further enGreatered Northshore, because the actual Snohomish County map is absolutely a trainwreck.

It’s mostly for the Interurban North and North Creek trails but not just that.

Also new since map set 1.2:

• Construction warnings with dates! At least the ones I know about, which means Juanita Way. They’re widening the bike lanes but that means there aren’t bike lanes sometimes while they work.
• New bike lanes on 73rd Ave NE in Kenmore!
• Bike shop icons in Northshore
• Route updates in Bothell and Lake Forest Park
• Misc small stuff

URLs have not changed. Enjoy!

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Greater Northshore and MEGAMAP Bike Maps version 1.2.2, Mid-June 2024, dropped at the usual place. This is a very minor release.

I don’t see any substantial updates for the next few months; we’re as up-to-date as I think I can get. There is, however, some relevant new construction that falls into the Greater Northshore area, and that’ll get reflected as it comes online.

Changes:

• Added “Very Bumpy” note near Shoreline Interurban Trailhead
• Added start of bike lanes and “To Interurban Trail North” above that
• Extended fully-separated lane one block east in northern Shoreline after in-person verification
• Corrected types of routes (red-dash vs. green-dot) around Lake Forest Park Town Centre to more accurately reflect Burke Gilman-Interurban Trail connector signage
• Extended North Creek Trail a little into Snohomish County to indicate it continues

Direct “latest map” links have not changed.

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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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