Biking (maps) Made Simple

I wanted to give a shout-out to Halton Region for their new cycling maps. Municipalities having bike maps are nothing new, but the thing I really want to compliment is the overall simplicity about Halton Region's.

First, they understand the limitations of their region. No one is going to use their bike to travel from Oakville to Halton Hills, but they might use it to travel around the more residential areas of the city. Take a look at this map of southern Oakville:

Those curvy, winding roads are indicative of residential areas. While certainly this doesn't cut through all of Oakville, it circles enough of the area that a good chunk of their residential area is near the "red" bicycle-friendly areas; given that they will have generally less traffic, they'll be fairly easy to bike on/through. It's also continuous, and hits a number of parks along the harbour. It even tells you how difficult the entire trek is!

Secondly, I want to point out is how simple and clean this map is. For comparison, here is a picture of the downtown Toronto cycling map:

Not going to lie to you: this kind of map intimidates the heck out of me. I know that Toronto isn't the most bike friendly city in the world, but it's certainly bikeable. Yes, as the map above shows there are connection issues between bike lanes/paths, but more disagreeable is how this map shows too much information and too little simultaneously.