GOBikeBoulder.net

GOBikeBoulder.net says I should take this route to lunch today. Thanks, but I prefer off-street riding.

It’s that time of year again: Walk & Bike Week is upon us — when Boulderites are cajoled and coaxed to get out of our cars and onto the town’s many trails, sidewalks, and bike lanes.

To celebrate, GO Boulder’s new local bike route resource, GOBikeBoulder.net, is finally up. The Daily Camera reports that this web application was a year in the making and cost a total of $150,000.

In about an hour I’m having lunch with a colleague from my former employer, E Source, to talk about the carbon tax tracker project. They’re located in the office park just north of Arapahoe and East of 55th. I’m biking to that meeting, so I thought I’d see how GOBikeBoulder.net would direct this trip…

I’m starting from my home in S. Boulder, in the Greenbelt Meadows neighborhood (just south of the E. Boulder Rec Center). My neighborhood borders on open space to the east, and the lovely South Boulder Creek Path (multiuse) runs right past my house.

I plugged my starting and ending addresses into GOBoulderBike.net and told it I prefer off-street routes. It generated this map.

Hmmm… These directions would indeed get me to my meeting, but it’s all on-street riding. I’m puzzled why, given my stated preference for off-street riding, it didn’t send me up the S. Boulder Creek Path and north from there along bike trails to Arapahoe, to minimize the amount of street riding.

I’m sure this is a temporary glitch. Like all newly launched web apps, this is a work in progress. And it is worth trying — and using.

From an energy and greenhouse gas perspective, though, this site offers a really cool tool. Click the “calculators” tab. There, the site computes the energy and environmental impact of the specific bike ride mapped. Here’s what it says for the trip I mapped:

Benefit of Biking this Route vs. Driving

Calorie Calculator
An average cyclist will burn 137.4 calories riding this route

Emissions Savings
Hydrocarbons: 0.025lbs
Carbon Monoxide: 0.19lbs
Nitrogen Oxide: 0.013lbs
Carbon Dioxide: 3.1407lbs

Cost Calculator
An average cyclist will save $ 1.93 riding this route

Now, that’s useful! Of course, i would like to know that assumptions go into those calculations. I will ask GO Boulder for more info on that.

The site also offer more transporation-impact calculators — but I have to head out to lunch, so I’ll write about them later.

In all, this is a pretty good start. Well done, GO Boulder.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Bikes, Greenhouse gas emissions, Measuring emissions, Transportation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.