Happy National Bicycle Month!-Post 1

Though we've had rainy, lousy bicycling weather here since the 1st, May is National Bicycle Month. At the risk of being overly self-indulgent and boring my map readers to tears, I plan on making May's posts all be bicycle related to honor the month. This first map is from the League of American Bicyclists. They put out a very nice brochure listing their designated "Bicycle Friendly Communities". These communities were given medals - Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze. There are photos and descriptions of projects in each city. Unfortunately the map on their web site is lousy. The dots are too small, the contrast is terrible, the background color is too dark making the little dots hard to see and the color scheme is not very logical. Brown = Silver? Blue = Bronze? The map is interactive in that you can click on a state, get the community list and click each city or town to get a page with photos, its highlights, and accomplishments. You can also see your state's rank. Patterns? Mostly West Coast and college towns with some other clusters in Arizona and Colorado. Until the recent additions of Philly and New York the northeast was looking pretty bare. We're still awful and we know it!