As mentioned here and elsewhere, the LADOT Bike Program has recently completed a long-overdue update of our LA City Bike Maps. As part of getting these maps out to the public, I get to mail out maps (free to you) and each coordinator gets to drops off boxes of new maps all over the City at bike shops and bike co-ops. This approach makes plenty of sense: Members of the public who are most likely to want a bike map are also those members of the public most likely to visit bike shops and bike co-ops.
The coordinators have delivered so many maps, in fact, that we only have enough Valley Bike Maps left to mail out to people submitting map requests. This past week, I rode along with coordinator Brendan Keeler and intern Derek Levoit, delivering bike maps across downtown and the westside.
24 at a Time
Considering that our method of delivering bike maps is via Prius, we can only carry so many boxes of bike maps at once. Through a trial and error method, we found that the magic number of bike map boxes the Prius can hold is 24. This means we can deliver maps to 12 shops at a time: each shop gets 2 boxes (or 450 maps).
On Thursday, we hit 12 different bike shops around the westside, and the co-op Bikerowave. While some bike shop owners seemed a little confused at first by the offer of free bike maps, they were all sporting a smile by the time we left. On Friday, we hit 9 bike shops around downtown and dropped off 6 boxes of maps at LACBC headquarters. We also had the chance to drop in on the guys at BiciLibre, give them some free maps, and check out their setup.
Does Your Bike Shop Have the New LADOT Bike Maps?
While the LADOT Bike Program has yet to finish all our deliveries (mostly in the Central City and Westside areas), we want to make sure that we didn’t miss your local bike shop. Its quite amazing how many new bike shops there are in our city. If your favorite bike shop doesn’t have bike maps, have them send us an email at ladotbikeblog@gmail.com and we’ll make sure they get on our list for deliveries.
There’s another incentive to getting free bike maps delivered to your local bike shop. As stated earlier this month, when we run out of our current print order of bike maps, we get to update our bike maps again before ordering a reprint. All the infrastructure added since the end of 2010 (when the maps were completed) will be added in any subsequent reprint. So let’s make sure your local bike shop has got their free maps and help us run through the maps we’ve got now ASAP.
More photos from our delivery adventures at our flickr page.
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don’t know when you all up date your site, but it is 2016 now. I’m just saying.
Hi David,
We have moved our site to bike.lacity.org
Thank you!