Ride Oregon: New website promotes bike tourism in Oregon
Posted by Jonathan Maus (Publisher/Editor) on August 5th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
The mission to make Oregon “The Land Bicycles Dream About” has taken a big step forward. A new website to promote biking in Oregon and to inspire people to get out and ride launched yesterday. Check it out at RideOregonRide.com.
The site was first pegged as a priority during a brainstorming session at the Oregon Bike Summit back in April of 2008. Since then, Travel Oregon has spearheaded an effort to make it happen. They formed a committee of local bike advocates and experts for guidance, hired interactive brand strategy agency Substance to build it, and invested the money to make it a reality.
For Travel Oregon, the site is a way to make biking a larger and more profitable component of Oregon’s $1 billion dollar outdoor tourism industry.
Attendees of this year’s Oregon Bike Summit got a sneak peek at the site. As of yesterday it’s available to the public.
The site boasts an abundance of special tools to find, rate, and then save and share your favorite rides, interactive maps, social media features, a ride and event calendar, editorial articles, photographs and more.
From the home page, visitors can choose whatever type of biking they’re interested in and then be whisked away to an interactive map with an inset list of “Featured” rides, or they can select to view all trails in the database.
Visitors can search for events and rides not just by riding type, but by region or city. There are also suggested itineraries depending on how many days you’d like to travel. And this isn’t just about rural riding. Select to see a list of rides from Portland and you’ll get information on Bridge Pedal, Sunday Parkways, the Tour de Lab, and more.
Substance and their partners have worked for months to build the site’s content. Their work has resulted in a one-stop-shop where anyone can read and learn more about everything Oregon has to offer as a bike riding destination — whether you like to ride fast, slow, on-road, off-road, in the city, or in the country.
The idea is to continually accept new ride suggestions and articles, but that presents a challenge for Substance and Travel Oregon. They currently have no dedicated source of ongoing funds to maintain the site. Without someone continuously moderating and polishing new content, the site won’t be able to live up to its potential. Hopefully a source of funds for this purpose can be found.
I’ve been poking around the site for a few days now and have been totally impressed. Very nice to look at, and loaded with neat functionality well thought-out features. This is an important step for biking in Oregon and should have a real impact on making our state the premier two-wheeled travel destination.
Take a look for yourself at RideOregonRide.com and let us know what you think.
I’m wondering why the mountain bike routes don’t actually show a route on the map — just a ‘trailhead’.
RecommendedI can haz dream job now? I would love to spend my days updating that site.
Recommendedf5,
We used the Google mapping API to handle the mapping on the site, and unfortunately they don’t support mapping across offroad trails (yet).
We are looking into a couple of different ways to support this in the future, as we know it’s an important thing, but for now, we can only mark the trailheads.
RecommendedHi,
Super huge thanks to Jonathan for putting a spotlight on RideOregonRide.com. One correction, we do actually have dedicated funds for both site maintenance and content development, albeit we would like to augment what we have to continue enhancing the site and to create complementary programs such as developing a network of bike-friendly businesses across the state.
Cheers,
RecommendedKristin Dahl
Travel Oregon
See if you can get Google to let you guys do test runs of the bike/trike based Street View image capture system.
Look at http://www.hitsearchlimited.com/news/9992490/
The pictures I’ve seen only show a trike but if you can get the mapping data into the system with the cameras it should show up regardless.
RecommendedPlus you’d have some good imagery to woo tourists with.
This is awesome, much cleaner and OR centric than anything like mapmyride. I will def put some of my favorite PDX rides and tours on it. Kudos.
RecommendedThis is a great way to promote biking Oregon, I love it.
Although I do have to point out that the guy on the homepage pic, is wearing Moots shorts, um couldn’t you get some shorts from one of the hundreds of local builders/shops in Oregon? Moots are made in Steamboat Springs, CO.
The other first impression, was when looking at services, I could sort by type of service, or by city or region, but not by both. So if I am visiting Portland and want to find a service I have to wade through all of the listings. It would be awesome to sort for Portland, then by shops, or restaurants, etc..or maybe I was doing it wrong?
Not trying to nit pick, just some suggestions. Overall, it is great, glad you all did it and can update it.
RecommendedFantastic! I was just about to start planning a multi-day trip, and this (and warmshowers.org) should help a lot.
Recommendedpsyclist,
I can’t comment on the gear in the photos, only to say that our “kit everyone at Substance in Rapha” sponsorship program fell through. Maybe somebody at Castelli can come through…
As far as services go, you can find by region city. If you dig into “Oregon by Bike” and then choose a region or city, rides, trails, events and services are sorted by location. For example:
http://rideoregonride.com/by-bike/region/portland-metro/
We’re happy you are enjoying the site. We look forward to improving the experience over the next several months so feedback is encouraged and appreciated.
d.
Recommended@psyclist
If anything, the MOOTS shorts image is the epitome image of what the site is all about: getting out-of-state bicyclists and tourists into the state via the vibrant Oregon bicycle industry!
Caption: Steamboat Springs, CO tourist is enjoying a break on the Crater Lake, OR trail.
RecommendedJust saw this site and love it. Two friends and I decided this morning to use it to plan a multi-day bike trip to Oregon later this fall. We were talking about other states, but this site made us change our plans.
Recommended@psyclist
You should be able to sort for services in 1 of 2 ways:
1) Go to the listings of services at the bottom of any screen. Click on the type of service you’re looking for (say bike shops). On the listings page, you can click on city and it will re-order the listings by city from A-Z. Unfortunately Portland is in the middle so you have to scroll a bit.
2) Otherwise, go into Oregon By Bike and you’ll see a Cities drop down menu on the lower right. Select a city there. Once on the City detail page you can find all of the trails, routes, events, and all the services found in that city. I think this is the more efficient way unless you’re looking for something in Albany.
Have fun, and sorry about the Moot shorts. The pic is from Cycle Oregon in 2007. The next photo in the slide show shows a Sweetpea bike and a dress sold at Clever Cycles…so keep flipping!
Cheers,
RecommendedKristin, Travel Oregon
LOVE it! thank you thank you!
One suggestion: wine rides. My husband works for the Willamette Valley Wineries Assn and they get tons of requests for tasting-by-bike options. There are no good resources for that yet, so if it were added to this it would be huge. I’m sure Columbia, Umpqua and Rogue Valley wineries would agree.
RecommendedYou can definitely draw off-trail on a Google Map. You can draw poly-lines on a Google Map that go anywhere. We did this for the Portland Hikers field guide, using GPX tracks.
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RecommendedWow, that’s a cool site. Looking forward to playing with it more!
Re: Wine rides: E#13: sometimes, you gotta organize ’em yourself. 🙂 I’ve got any number of routes in Yamhill that go past wineries, but if they’re not open, people won’t visit (a la JMaus’ unfortunate attempt to visit Champoeg winery).
Also, it’s oft-times difficult or unwanted to ride your skinny tire bike up some of the long gravel drives of the wineries, so that could be nixing some people’s plans to wine by bike.
Recommendedhey! as much as i love bike tourism ads and all, they coulda used a homegrown bike logo on the shorts. not that i have anything against moots, but while you’re promoting oregon riding, may as well pop some homey’s brand on the shorts instead of a colorado one. easy photoshop project boys.
Recommended[…] find a searchable bike ride and event database powered by RideOregonRide.com. Travel Oregon helped fund and develop that website last year to support bike tourism throughout the […]
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