In an effort to showcase some of the best bike rides in the region, the Washington County Visitor’s Association (WCVA) is working on an update of their bike map; and they want your feedback and suggestions to make it even better.
The map covers Washington County and is intended for both visitors and locals. Allison George with the WCVA says the map is scheduled to be released later this fall. The format and coding of the new map will be consistent with those used on Metro’s Bike There! map. From what I’ve seen of the draft PDFs, the map is very impressive. There are several featured rides — including the “Historic Helvetia Loop” and the “Fern Hill Loop” — that include a description of the route, GPS coordinates, an elevation profile and so on. And, since this is a WCVA publication, there’s a complete listing of nearby wineries.
Here’s a detail shot from the draft version of the map:
If you ride in Washington County and would like to offer input on the maps before they are printed, go to the WCVA’s FTP site. The two files to review are PDFs named “WaCoBikeMap_Back_Draft4_080810.pdf” and “WaCoBikeMap_Front_Draft4_080810.pdf.” To access the FTP site use username “wcvaFTP” and password “ftp4wcva”.
In order to get feedback from BikePortland readers, the WCVA has extended their suggestion submision deadline to Friday, October 8th. All feedback should be sent to Gerald Kubiak at gkubiak13(at)yahoo.com.
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It’s asking for a login.
Sorry… just added it to end of story — Jonathan
Looks like they took a few cues from Clackamas County’s revised bike map – good call, Clackamas set the new bar for county bike maps. Also, great to see the garish colors from the previous Washington County map disappear.
The closeups are well done, and they seem to have shown more bike routes outside the county than the Clackamas map. The biggest issue I see with this map is that there are no indicators to show steep hills on the routes, making use of the map problematic for those who want to plan the flattest route.
I tried to load the pdf’s up tonight with dial-up, but no go. I can probably take a look somewhere tomorrow.
Got a copy of the old map. It’s great, except for the lines indicating routes being a bit unnecessarily wide and too bright in color. The brightly colored lines might be “…the garish colors …” matt picio was referring to.
The coloring of the general field of the old map seems fine to me. Color transitioning plus shading and a co-ordinating elevation scale was used to indicate elevation change for the areas displayed on this map.
The recently published Bike Tigard map actually has topographical elevation lines (they’re colored a little too lightly). Also uses arrows on the routes to indicate climbs in simple fashion.