Bike Reno

The RGJ wants to remind everyone that cyclists need to obey traffic laws, too. Nothing wrong with that…I see way too many people riding on the wrong side of the street (which makes it dangerous for me when I’m riding on the right side of the street) and riding at night without any lights. I did however, find their description of fixies very amusing:

A new problem is bicycles without brakes to save on weight, favored by college students. Riders stop by not pedaling.

Pretty much every word of that is wrong or misleading, but what can you do?

In other news, Google has added bicycling directions to their maps for certain cities. And amazingly, Reno seems to be one of those cities! I tried getting directions from the northwest part of town to south Reno and it put me on Virginia for a good 3-4 miles. Oops. Hopefully they’ll get that fixed. They have a feature where you can grab the path they created and drag it to a different street to change the route. It works pretty well, but the algorithm definitely favors the shortest route which, in Reno, is usually the wrong one.

The RTC has been working on a new version of their bike map for a while now, and a basic online version (using Google Maps) is available:

RTC Bike Map

It only shows on-street bike lanes and a couple of the major bike paths right now.  Hopefully in the future they will add the multi-use paths in areas like the northwest and Caughlin Ranch along with some of the good connector streets.