About our maps

We draw our own maps. Every colour, every line weight, every point of interest is chosen to answer one question: what does a cyclist need to see?

Oasis in the desert

A city, seen through the eyes of a cyclist, is mostly car infrastructure. We call that the desert. Scattered through it are oases — places where you can ride without thinking about traffic. A separated bike path along the river. A trail through the woods. A quiet lane that connects two neighbourhoods. These are the places where cycling feels like what it is: freedom.

The map is built around two questions.

Can I ride here without worrying about cars?

We use colour to answer this at a glance:

Oasis (teal). Separated from car traffic. Dedicated cycleways, multi-use paths, bike trails. Bold, visible from the widest zoom levels.
Exposed (muted teal, dashed in high contrast). On-road bike lanes. Rideable, but you’re sharing space with cars.
Desert (pale earth tones). Car roads. Present for orientation — you need to know where the streets are — but visually quiet. Not hidden, just not the focus.

The mental test: does riding here feel calm enough that traffic fades from your mind? That feeling — not a literal safety rating, just that sense of being somewhere designed for you — is what makes something an oasis.

Here’s what that looks like. The teal cycling network becomes the dominant visual layer, while car roads recede into warm earth tones:

Ottawa's central cycling network on the custom map — teal paths along the river and through parks stand out clearly against pale roads and soft green spaces

Compare with the same area on standard map tiles, where cycling infrastructure competes with every other map feature for attention:

The same area on standard map tiles — cycling paths are thin blue lines lost among roads, labels, and land use colours

Can I stop here?

Long rides need stops. We prioritise them by how critical they are mid-ride:

Water and restrooms (blue dots, visible from zoom level 10). On a hot day, knowing where the next water fountain is changes everything.
Camping (orange dots, visible from the widest zoom). When you’re planning a multi-day ride, you need to see where you can sleep before you zoom in anywhere.
Food and lodging (orange dots, visible from zoom level 15). Restaurants, cafes, hotels, shelters. Useful when you’re close, not when you’re planning from far away.
Bike infrastructure (teal dots). Shops, rental stations, repair stands. Same colour family as oasis — part of the cycling ecosystem.

Wide view of Ottawa showing POI dots — camping sites visible from afar, water and bike infrastructure at medium zoom

Fewer categories, less noise

A gravel trail, a mountain bike track, and a hiking path with bike access all get the same teal. The question is always the same: can I bike here? If yes, it’s an oasis. Surface details belong in the route description, not on the map.

Twelve colour categories for different path types would be a reference poster, not a tool for riding. We’d rather a map you can read at a glance.

Zooming in

At the city scale, the difference becomes even clearer. Downtown Ottawa — the standard tiles show a dense grid of roads, blue cycling icons, and labels all competing for space:

Downtown Ottawa on standard map tiles — dense labels, blue bike lane markers, road hierarchy all at similar visual weight

The custom style on the same area. Car roads fade. The teal cycling paths along the canal and through the islands read immediately:

Downtown Ottawa on the custom map — teal cycling paths along the canal and through the islands are the first thing you see

The wide view

Zoomed out to the region, the custom style shows the full cycling network as a connected system. Routes, paths, and trails form a web of teal across the landscape:

The Ottawa region zoomed out — the cycling network reads as a connected teal web across the landscape

The same zoom on standard tiles. The cycling network is there in the data, but it doesn’t read as a system — just scattered blue lines among everything else:

The same region on standard tiles — route lines and POI markers compete with the busy base map

High-contrast variant

Not everyone sees colour the same way. The high-contrast variant encodes all information through line weight and dash patterns rather than colour:

Almost monochrome. Paper-like. Black lines on white.
Oasis paths are thick and solid. Exposed lanes are dashed. Car roads are thin.
Every piece of data present in the default map is present here — nothing is lost, just encoded differently.

The high-contrast variant — Ottawa's cycling network rendered in bold black lines on a clean white base, like a poster print

How it works

The map style is generated from a TypeScript script (scripts/build-map-style.ts) that outputs MapLibre GL style JSON. It renders Thunderforest outdoors-v2 vector tiles built on OpenStreetMap data.

The entire style is code. Colours live in palette objects. Line widths are zoom-interpolated. POI categories map to tiers. Both variants — the warm default and the high-contrast — share the same layer structure; only the palette differs. Version-controlled, reviewable, reproducible.

Why this matters

A map is a statement about what matters. Ours says cycling matters.

When someone opens a route page, the map should make cycling feel like a real, supported way to move through a place. The teal paths say: this infrastructure exists, and it connects to places worth going.