Try out Bike Streets, the new SLC Low-Stress Bike Map!
We’re excited to announce that we’ve built out a Low-Stress Bike Map for Salt Lake City and the surrounding area using a free app called Bike Streets! The approach is a little different than a typical biking app - instead of preferring the fastest route on conventional bike lanes, Bike Streets sticks to the safest routes, which is essentially the “best available” low-stress bike network. This is different from existing apps like Strava which heavily focus on recreation and sport. Bike Streets prioritizes separated paths, protected or traffic calmed bike lanes, neighborhood byways, and other neighborhood routes. The network was produced by dedicated mappers with Sweet Streets, with some help with testing and suggestions from our volunteers.
The app is refreshed daily, meaning detours can be quickly captured (looking at you Jordan River Trail) and the network updated to reflect the best route. Remember the Salt Lake County bike map? Yeah, that's now 7 years old. Bike Streets also includes a way for anyone to suggest a route, vote on a suggestion, and report closures. Outdated maps are a thing of the past.
It’s perfect for navigating around unfamiliar areas of the city, especially if you’re new to biking for transportation. Even if you know where you’re going, we’d love for you to use the “Ride” option so you contribute to the count of car trips replaced by bikes for our advocacy efforts.
Bike Streets originated in Denver, and their advocacy led to their low-stress bike network “VAMOS” becoming endorsed by many candidates for city council and mayor. Here in Salt Lake City, the low-stress bike network fits in perfectly with our neighborhood byways campaign, and we can use the app to further our efforts in getting traffic calming and safer crossings installed throughout the city.
Here’s how to use Bike Streets:
Download the Bike Streets app
Sign up using your email
Touch the Ride button in the Bike Streets app each time you bike
Help us build data for advocacy
Salt Lake City’s Low-Stress Bike Map in Bike Streets. Note the map also includes conventional bike lanes if you’d like to use them!
Get riding with Bike Streets and share it with your friends and family who are “interested but concerned” about biking!
