About RAGBRAI
The Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI) is an annual 7-day bicycle ride across the state, the oldest, largest and longest bicycle touring event in the world. The ride attracts participants from all 50 states and many foreign countries and has covered thousands of miles through the years, and hundreds of thousands of riders have hopped in the saddle to pedal part of those miles. It started in 1973 as a six-day ride across the state of Iowa by two Des Moines Register columnists who invited a few friends along. It is held the last full week in July and the route is usually announced the last week of the January before. RAGBRAI is planned and coordinated by The Des Moines Register. For more information, visit ragbrai.com.
Why RAGBRAI?
My team wanted to study the dynamics of the route, since people often choose different portions of the route in which to enter and participate. The RAGBRAI home web site has several sources of information in different places, some hard to locate, and the organization receives these calls in excess requesting such, so this project incorporated sporadic map elements as their own layers to turn off/on under one roof for ease of access. This also minimizes logistical trouble so future volunteers and returners gain a more in-depth idea of RAGBRAI's nature and receive needed information more efficiently.
Future Plans
The project was assembled with some goals in mind. One of which is to help influence composition of the bike ride's future routes across Iowa starting with 2015. When a major organized event such as RAGBRAI has flourished as long and extensively, there is always a guarantee that stretches of routes will overlap, and other sections of the state will be left out. The interactive map would help identify those areas visually and lay groundwork for a balance in familiar vs. unfamiliar territory for future routes.
As far as expertise goes, this project showed great integration between fields from GIS and geography to design. Specific programming languages included Python, Javascript, and HTML for this endeavor. It is hoped that a side-by-side combination of this integrated map and map gallery could be a stepping stone towards a more exemplary system of documenting bicycle data for any event around the world.