Swan Dive

[ornoth_cycling]

As I mentioned in my last post, multiple people pointed me toward Oscar Swan’s book “Bike Rides Out of Pittsburgh” as the best way for a new resident to get up to speed on cycling routes around the city.

Having read the book, here are my impressions, in hopes of setting expectations for any other riders in my position.

I can kinda see why people recommend the book. It’s both thorough and authoritative. As I see it, here are the book’s pluses:

• It’s available for free loan from the Carnegie Library. Yay!
• It details no less than 425 different rides surrounding the city in all directions. There’s no shortage of routes to choose from.
• It is a great resource for learning the locations of all the suburban towns around Pittsburgh.
• Because rides are grouped roughly by major routes out of the city, it’s also a good way to identify the most likely roads you’ll take to get into the open countryside.
• Because it covers nearly every road in a 75-mile radius of town, it gives the impression that you can bike pretty much anywhere… at least in theory.
• There are quite a lot of photos.

Although it’s a great resource for the above purposes, the book has a lot of problems, too. Despite the number of recommendations I received for it, my impression is that-as a local might say-“It ain’t all ’at.” Here are its negatives:

• To begin with, it’s out of print. If you want to read it, you have to find someone who has it and borrow it, or (a plus mentioned above) get it from the library.
• Secondly, it’s out of date. It was printed in 2005, and since then several roads have been renamed, renumbered, rerouted, reconfigured, or superseded.
• Most challenging was the fact that there isn’t a single map in the entire book: neither a broad regional map showing the general overview nor any maps of individual rides. The only way to know where these rides are located is to cross-reference them with a highly-detailed map, which is exactly what I did, creating my own Google Map of all his routes.
• Which is how I discovered another major challenge: Swan covers pretty much every single road within a 75-mile radius of the city, all the way into West Virginia and Ohio. Where a new rider might be looking for a handful of the nicest rides, the author gives you every conceivable route.
• That wouldn’t be bad, except that he also doesn’t give the reader any information on which to compare routes. His descriptions are all barebones directions: On this ride, go left on Broad, right on Main to Maple, and return on Summer Street. The author doesn’t add any more information than what you’d get from the sparsest little cue sheet.
• The kicker is that the book wasn’t proofed at all. In building my Google Map, I learned things that casual readers would overlook: that the author sometimes misspelled the names of roads, and surprisingly frequently mixed up his left and his right. There were places where his directions assumed local knowledge, such as giving directions based on where a former landmark used to be, and included extraneous information like a route being some particular local rider’s favorite, without giving us any idea who that rider was or why we should care. In several instances I had to leave part of a route off my map because the directions were so opaque that they couldn’t be deciphered. It’s definitely written for local residents, not for people new to the area.

From this you can correctly infer that my reaction to the book is mixed. I certainly derived a lot of value from the intensive month-long process of meticulously mapping out each ride; but the whole point of a book like this is to spare new residents such arduous, painstaking effort. And I still don’t know which roads are the good ones!

Although I was hoping to find a list of the best riding Pittsburgh has to offer, what I found was pretty much a bare list of a thousand roads, with no way to judge which ones I should explore first. Imagine trying to decide where to ride based on the red lines in this map (my plot of the author’s suggested routes):


Note: I will not share the URL of the Google Map out of respect for the author’s copyright on his material.

A new resident would be much better served by a book that did the following:

• Only describe the top 10 percent of those 425 rides: the nicest, safest, most interesting rides in the area.
• Describe those in detail: not just unadorned directions, but what each route is like and why it might appeal more than any other ride in the book.
• In addition to photos, include both overview and detailed maps to provide a visual image of where the routes start, end, and the places they go.
• Include turn-by-turn directions in cue sheet form in an appendix, or drag yourself kicking and screaming into the 21st Century by providing downloadable GPS tracklogs!

Yes, Swan’s book is one place to start in the effort to learn the local terrain. It’s helpful, but it’s nowhere near as helpful as it really ought to be in order to encourage more people to get out on their bikes, whether they’re veteran roadies who just moved into town or locals who are looking for help as they begin their journey as cyclists.

It’s certainly a good start, and illustrates the information cyclists needed back in the olden days, but if Pittsburgh wants to become a modern cycling city, it needs better.