Ilium and LADOT deliver new bike maps

LADOT intern Emily Dwyer shows off new LA bike maps at Flying Pigeon LA
Well would you look at that! A smiling LADOT intern and three new bike maps for Los Angeles, courtesy of the LADOT and produced by Ilium Strategic Marketing & Design of Seattle. Our shop and the Bike Oven (the bike repair collective next door) received 1500 maps of bike facilities in LA to line our nests with.

I first read about these bike maps way back in May of 2009 on Stephen Box’s excellent blog post “Metro/LADOT prefer imports over the locals

The City of LA authorized the LADOT to enter into a contract with Bellevue, WA’s Ilium Consulting and to produce a Bike Map with a cost “not to exceed $400,000.” Ilum Associates was selected because of its “extensive experience in the production of maps for use by the public.” The City Council approval took place in December of 1996 and since then, Ilium and the LADOT have apparently wandered off the trail as the funded Bike Map of Los Angeles has not appeared. Ilium, it should be noted does other marketing work for the LADOT. Apparently nobody knows the street of LA like the folks in Seattle. Are there no cartographers in Los Angeles? Are there no marketing companies in Los Angeles?

Box covered this issue again in his June 2009 blog post LA Bikeways stimulates Seattle and Portland economies

It took … ahem … a few years and $400,000 to get these maps produced, and not without a little controversy. They are here, however, and available free of charge to anyone that happens by the shop or the Bike Oven. There are three maps: one for the Westside and Harbor, one for the Valley, and one for Central LA (we’re on the Central map). They are actually pretty good maps just for tooling around the city in general. Stop by our shop and pick up yours today!

If you’d like a set of all three maps, we’d be happy to ship you some for the cost of postage. Just email us your mailing address, which map or maps you’d like, and we’ll proceed from there. Our email address is info@flyinpigeon-la.com

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2 Comments

  1. Posted March 10, 2011 at 12:01 pm | Permalink

    They can also get them 100% free right here:
    http://bicyclela.org/Maps_Request.htm

  2. Posted March 10, 2011 at 3:44 pm | Permalink

    $400,000.

    #killself

    Thanks for your support on Tuesday, Josef.

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  1. […] mentioned here and elsewhere, the LADOT Bike Program has recently completed a long-overdue update of our LA City Bike Maps.  As […]

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