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The Sabo Bridge will be closed again starting Monday, September 24 and will remain closed until December. The closure is for final repairs on the bridge. Cables and retrofitted diaphragm plates will be installed on the on the bridge. Bicycle and pedestrian traffic will be detoured to the intersection of East 28th Street and Hiawatha Avenue.
There will be a rally to support funding for refurbishing the Old Cedar Ave Bridge on Saturday morning. Governor Dayton will be there and a good turnout of bicyclists and other lovers of this historic bridge will help make the case for investing in the missing link to bike routes south of the Minnesota River.
Here are the details:
Date: September 22
Time 11:00 AM
Location: Old Cedar Ave Bridge;
Bike directions: The bridge is south of Old Shakopee Rd just west of Cedar Ave (Hwy 77) at the Minnesota River. It’s about 1.5 miles southwest of the Mall of America. Ride south on 12th Ave through Richfield and Bloomington or take the LRT to Mall of America station, then ride southwest on Old Shakopee Rd. Check the Twin Cities Bike Map for more details.
Bikeverywhere sells a number of digital bike maps.The goal of the maps is to zoom in on a couple of bike rides or trails that stand out.
We’d like to expand the selection of digital bike routes, but first we want to know what you think about the routes we already have. If you have already downloaded one of our maps, please click on the survey link below.
If you haven’t downloaded a map, we’ve got an incentive for you to try one out. All of our digital maps have been reduced to just $2.00. If you want to try just one of the maps, these are our suggestions for each of the three cities:
Twin Cities:
For a ride that is a little more off the beaten path, try the Scandia ride, in the northeast metro area. It’s a beautiful rolling ride through a semi-rural landscape of farms, ex-urban homes, wooded lots and small lakes.
Madison, Wisconsin:
Consider a weekend overnight ride from Madison to Devil’s Lake State Park. Midway through the ride you hop on the free Merrimac Ferry for a seven minute crossing of the Wisconsin River. The route goes slightly beyond the state park to Baraboo, the home of the Wringling Brothers/ Barnum and Bailey Circus Museum.
Milwaukee:
The Milwaukee Lake and River ride follows an extensive network of bike paths and residential roads along the shores of Lake Michigan and the banks of the Milwaukee River.
We’ve made it easy to find the survey anytime you visit the site. Just look for this notice at the bottom of any of our digital map pages on the website.
Take our Survey!
Bikeverywhere is constantly striving to make our products better. Click here to take our survey about this downloadable file.
The Twin Cities Bike Map is officially updated every three years, but research is an ongoing job and it follows a pattern. In 2011 revision 10.0 was released. Despite my best efforts, the latest edition always has some minor flaws and astute map owners will tell me about them. The changes, no more than a half dozen per revision, are researched when necessary and added to the map file on my computer. That’s usually the extent of research during the first year. It’s also a time for me to catch up on house projects that were put off during the more intense research years. Last year that included spending evenings and weekends painting the trim on the house.
The second year is the best year, and this has been an exceptionally good second year. This is the year that I take long, looping tours through the metro area. I’ve ridden to Stillwater to see the Nature Valley Grand Prix bike race, ridden an ad hoc century ride that crossed the Minnesota River at I-494, wandered through Eagan, Burnsville, Savage and Shakopee, then crossed the river again into Chaska. From there I worked my way to Excelsior and back to Minneapolis.
I’ve done 50 mile rides to the north, 40 miles to the west, short errand loops in every direction and, with each ride, I’ve adjusted my route to give me a look at existing and potential bike routes. The rides are always fun. They reassure me that routes are still good for cycling or they expose a route as unsuitable for future bike traffic.
They also give me a better feel for the interconnectedness of the routes. To me, a good bike map is one that allows cyclists to get from one place to another with a minimum of hassles. Turns should be intuitive from either direction, routes should flow from one to the next in a logical fashion and routes should be good in both directions. Year two allows me to test the map to see if the routes meet those criteria
It also takes some pressure off year three. The third year is the mop up year. I grid off the map and research each grid until all the roads have been reviewed. I get to know the area in detail, but I’m so deep into the weeds that it is hard to see how the various routes combine to form good loops or direct routes to destinations. I’m on and off the bike frequently during year three as I stop to study the map and plot routes. I backtrack often to pick up a spur that shoots off into a new direction and I hit a lot of dead ends as I follow routes that don’t work out.
I still have a couple of good months left in year two and plan to take advantage of them. If you see me passing through your neighborhood, say Hi, and if you have suggestions for new routes or changes to existing routes, let me know. Many of the best routes on the Twin Cities Bike Map come from cyclists who know their area of the Twin Cities better than I can hope to know.
Stop by the Eco Building of the State Fair this Friday at 2:30 if you want to learn a little more about the bike trails of the Twin Cities. The 40 minute presentation will cover the major bike trails of the city and show how they can be connected to form loops or act as car free commuting corridors. I’ll hang around after the talk to discuss the trails with anyone who wants to learn more.
This morning’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has a front-page article about the growth of interest in bicycling in Milwaukee. You can read it here: Milwaukee keeps rolling on path to being bike friendly. The city plans to paint more bike lanes and, on roads that are too narrow, add “sharrows” that indicate cars and bikes must share the roadway.
Other Milwaukee news: a ground breaking is planned for Thursday, August 30 at 9:30 am for an extension of the Hank Aaron State Trail in the direction of the domes. Hank Aaron is expected to attend. It will be held at Valley Passage (where the trail crosses the Menomonee River and a side trail goes south to the new branch of the Urban Ecology Center (opening in September) and the Wisconsin Bike Fed offices.
It was only a matter of time before someone put them all together into an event. In this case three events over three weekends in September. The Root River Trail will be celebrating a Taste of the Trail. Each community along the trail will include its own growers, producers and restaurateurs, offering complimentary samples of their products. Fare will include the famous pies of Whalen, Lefse made on a wood fired stove, a Norwegian favorite rommegrot, jams, jellies, honey and more from local farmers and a hearty breakfast of pancakes, sausage and scrambled eggs.
Bring your bikes and log some miles. you will need the appetite.
Dates for the multi-weekend event:
For more information click here.
The Sabo Bridge, on the Midtown Greenway in Minneapolis, will be closed for a week starting at 7:00 pm Sunday, August 19. A new retrofitted diaphragm plate will be installed on the bridge. The old plate failed and caused the supporting cables to break loose, causing the bridge to collapse. Bicycle and pedestrian traffic will be detoured to the intersection of East 28th St and Hiawatha Ave.
The bridge closure isn’t the only disruption to the Greenway. The city is sand sealing and doing maintenance on the entire trail to protect the surface and make it last at least another 10 years. The sand sealing closures will continue until the entire trail is finished.
Met singer/songwriter Brianna Lane at the 46th St Block Party yesterday. Vicky was carrying a prototype handbag made from the 2008 Twin Cities Bike Map and Brianna was studying it in detail. She wasn’t thinking handbags, however. Her thoughts had moved to a dress. Specifically, a dress for Interbike 2013, the bike industry’s biggest annual gathering in Las Vegas. She is booked for a gig at the event.
Brianna is no slouch on a bike. The bike is her main form of transportation and in September she leaves with Peter Mulvery on a bicycle/music tour through the back roads of Wisconsin. She travels 60-100 miles per day and still has energy left to play her gigs in the evening. Previous music/bike tours have taken her as far as Boston.
By the end of the night, Brianna had enough maps to create a dress, with a few extras to cover for any problems that she may encounter in designing and sewing the garment. She promised to send a picture of the map dress.
Around 1970, Wisconsin was the first state to map out a bike route crossing the state: the Wisconsin Bikeway that ran from LaCrosse to Kenosha, and later to Racine and Milwaukee. But then it dropped it. This inspired me to start the Wisconsin Bicycle Routes site, for fear that the good long-distance routes would gradually become a distant memory.
On this site, I posted the cue sheets of the bikeways. After completing research for the update of the Milwaukee and Southeastern Wisconsin Map, I decided it would be interesting to take a look at how much of the original route would stay the same. While the route in most of the state is still a good one, in southeastern Wisconsin, there are better roads in some places: less busy and more direct. I suggest alternative routes on the site.