Welcome to Montgomery Bicycle Advocates!

www.mobike.org

Advocacy - Design - Education

Our mission

...To advocate for the creation of a robust network of bike-friendly streets and hiker/biker trails across Montgomery County, and to raise public awareness of bicycling as transportation.

Join our forum!


Alert: Support the Lake Frank Trail

Visit our Lake Frank Trail page for more information on saving this trail from NIMBYs.

BikeZip Map Project

The Bicycle Map Project is an initiative to create an extremely useful online bike map that is created and updated by its users, wiki-style. The map is called BikeZip. The fact that it's maintained by its users -- bicyclists -- will allow its content to be very accurate and current, as opposed to typical bike maps created by a single party or government. This also will allow a tremendous amount of content to be generated quickly. The BikeZip map will be interactive, allowing bikeways to be displayed or hidden based on preferred bikeway type, etc. BikeZip will be able to automatically generate "bike there" directions to get you from point A to point B.

For more details, see a description of BikeZip at www.BikeMapProject.org.

Important Links

Contact Your Elected Officials!

If you have a bike concern, let your elected representatives know about it! Don't be afraid to write, email, fax or call County Council members, the County Executive, your state representatives or the governor. Tell them you're a cyclist and what your needs and concerns are, whether it's a gap in an important bike route or a deteriorating bike path or missing bike racks. Please see our Directory Page for contact information for your state and county elected officials.

Routes, Gaps, Priorities

Routes and Gaps

MoBike is always working to identify important bike routes as well as problem streets and missing bikeways in Montgomery County. This guides our recommendations regarding county budgets, project priorities and new project ideas.

We've started by creating a map of bike-friendly routes and not-so-friendly gaps. Routes are in green, gaps in magenta. The map is depicted below (click to enlarge).

Click on map for larger view

High Priority Project List

We were able to analyze the map of routes and gaps to identify high priority gaps around the county. The following lists identify the most critical gaps that the county has jurisdiction over (no state or city roads). Input is needed. This is just a first cut. Projects solidly "in the works" are not listed.

Small Projects

These may be suitable for the county's small scale Annual Bikeways Program

Big Projects
Standalone Trail Projects
Other Projects
A handful of projects don't fix a countywide route but would improve access to an important destination. An additional set of projects are repeat requests that we need to keep pressing for. Just a few of these miscellaneous projects are listed here:

Send your comments and input to:
.

Spine Routes

At the same time, we're trying to identify "spine" routes, important countywide routes that will (if developed) provide fast access to every part of the county, like major arterials in the road network. Not all these routes are bike-friendly or even built yet, but most are at least planned as bike routes. This exercise is highly useful because it prioritizes corridors, highlights gaps in these corridors, and gives routes an identity that supports wayfaring, signing and naming/numbering. It will also help us improve the MCBAG Top 10 (or 20) list. By listing all the problems within a corridor as one item on the Top 10 List, we can save room on the list and emphasize context.

Of course these aren't the only important routes, just those that qualify as spine routes.

A tentative list of spine routes is depicted in the map below (click to enlarge).

Click on map for larger view

Tentative Spine Route List

Radial Routes
Lateral Routes
Diagonals and Other Spine Routes
Trail Spine Routes

(Some of these may not be ideal spine routes due to location or their hilly and windy character, but they are nevertheless long and useful and many are already built. A bird in the hand...)

In conclusion...

That's it! Please send your comments and input to:
.

Road Code Work Group

The county's Road Code Stakeholder Work Group, on which MoBike had a representative, has completed it's work. The group represented a variety of stakeholders who use the county's transportation system, as well as representatives of agencies involved in road design and community planning. The group came up with a series of road design standards which the County Executive submitted to the County Council for approval. The standards were approved by the County Council with just a few changes. The standards are certainly welcome from a cyclist's perspective, identifying width standards conducive to bicycling on many types of streets.

Yet More on Maps

See our new pilot map project at www.bikezip.com!

The county's Functional Master Plan of Countywide Bikeways was approved in February 2005.

Also see Montgomery County's own Bike Map Viewer which is a great resource (well, it is when it's working). You can zoom in to see aerial photography and top info for the entire county.

Other good aerial photo resources include Google Maps and TerraServer.

Want to download a good Montgomery County roadmap into your Palm Pilot or other PDA? Check out Mapopolis for good inexpensive downloadable PDA maps (thanks Bill M.).

Old Bike Map Project

MoBike's old Bicycle Map Project (www.montgomerybikemap.org) contains a lot of information about bike routes cyclists would like to see for Montgomery County, as well as existing routes. However, this site is a couple years out of date and not terribly easy to use. I'm working on a new bike map website that will hopefully be ready by the end of the year.

Friends of Bicycling!

The following Montgomery County communities have been very supportive of bicycling. Please let us know of any others!

Links

Contact Information

The Internet is our meeting hall – we “meet” frequently via the MoBike Yahoo! group. There we discuss MoBike issues. To join the group, send an email to MontgomeryBike-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. We also discuss issues face-to-face at MCBAG meetings (which shares most of our membership). To reach us directly, contact:

Montgomery Bicycle Advocates

Phone: 301-767-5998
7121 Thomas Branch Dr.
Bethesda, Md. 20817