The character map

What you're looking at#

Nearly every road, street, and path in British Columbia, scored seven ways from open data. We built these scores to help characterize routes and bike touring options around BC, and they seemed too useful to keep to ourselves.

Four of the lenses are preferences. More is not better, you just pick the level that suits the ride you want:

• Traffic comfort classifies how much motor traffic you share the road with, from separated paths through quiet streets to fast highways.
• Grade measures climbing in the harder direction: steady ascent per kilometre plus the steepest short pitch.
• Surface rates how rough it is underfoot, from R0 (paved) to R4 (extreme gravel, borders mountain biking).
• Remoteness measures how far you are from the next place to buy food, using the stores in our BC Bike Stops directory.

The other three are qualities, where more is better:

• Flow counts what makes you stop: traffic signals, stop signs, and crossings over the next kilometre of riding.
• Quiet is about noise. It measures distance from busy roads, rail lines, industrial land, and dense street networks. A road can be gorgeous and loud at the same time.
• Scenic reads the 100 metres around the road: water, forest, natural grass, farmland, cliffs, waterfalls, viewpoints, and how built-up it is.

Scenic, quiet, and flow are computed on roughly 100 metre slices of every road, so you can see a street turn from loud to calm as it leaves an arterial. The other four are computed per road segment.

The honest limits#

These scores are computed, not reviewed ride by ride. So far, we've calibrated them most carefully in Metro Vancouver, so expect rougher edges elsewhere in the province. Everything is derived from OpenStreetMap and public land cover and elevation data, so where those sources have gaps, we have gaps too. Remoteness is measured in straight lines, which understates real riding distance and is plain wrong across water. All of it is preliminary and will keep changing as we improve the models.

The traffic comfort ladder is adapted from HUB Cycling's bikeway classification, and we thank them for publishing it. The C1 to C6 labels are our own: HUB's map of Metro Vancouver is checked street by street in a way our computed province-wide estimates are not, so our classes carry our own names.

If a road you know well scores strangely, we would genuinely like to hear about it: heather@bccycletourism.ca.

Methods and licence#

The full write-up of how these scores are computed, with every rule and threshold and an unsoftened list of limitations, is in the methodology report: How we read the terrain (PDF). More datasets and reports live on our Research and Data page. Two naming notes for anyone cross-reading: in the dataset and the methodology PDF, quiet appears under its model name, peaceful, and surface as ruggedness.

None of this would exist without open data. The datasets this map is built from are credited in full on our thank-you page.

This map contains information from OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence. Basemap cartography © OpenMapTiles.

The research here uses AI assistance (Claude models, Anthropic) for data collection, analysis, and writing. Feel free to ask for more details if you are interested.