How Billy sees San Francisco

I think this image (which I just whipped up at work) explains my new vantage point of this city: it is a big messy pile of steep hills, with some (not so) secret passages connecting the lowlands.

Now that I'm biking everywhere, I find myself constantly wondering what route has the least amount of elevation climb. This is pretty fascinating since I spend all day at work trying to guess how people make travel decisions anyway; now, there seem to be some new variables entering the equations. If you're driving you don't much care about hills unless you're driving stick and you can't get up the Divisadero Street climb from Lombard without crushing the little green Honda behind you. But on a bike, suddenly about half the city seems pretty impassable.

I love how the "wiggle" to Golden Gate Park shows up on this map, the finger of green and yellow just north of the central red blob. Now that I've biked it, I finally "get" why those bike routes are so important.