Indiana Bike Trail Maps

Indiana Bike Trail Maps

Maps are super helpful when you want to plan your Indiana biking trips. Here are the online sources for maps.

These mapping sources are all really helpful. There is not a single source with all the map info you need!

Google Maps - This gives you a lot of functionality. Here are some points to remember.

  • Google maps - This is pretty good, but the colors are the same for a lane drawn on a busy road and a bike only path.

  • You need to go to layers and select the Bike layer or you don’t see the bike lanes at all. (if you don’t know how to do it then google it)

  • When you get directions, you can choose “by bike” then Google will route you via bike routes. Google seems to give equal preference to the Bike only trails and bike friendly roads. For this reason you may want to just do directions to an intermediate point and not your final destination.

Traillink.com - This is the national rails to trails website. They do a great job of mapping the Bike only trails nationwide. It has a whole route management and tracking system. It is a great resource.

The city of Indianapolis made a great map for the Indianapolis area - This is the absolute best of all of the biking maps if you are interested in Biking in Indianapolis or the surrounding counties. If you are on your phone then this page is location aware, so it is a really good resource for Indianapolis.

Next Level Trails Progress report - this is the state of Indiana’s map of the current trails + the trail projects that are funded with 180 million dollars. They say there are 11 projects under construction. It also does a great job of showing you all of the trails.

These Mapping resources are also helpful

We wanted to experiment with additional ways to map the Indiana Bike Trails. With considerable effort, we were able to create a google earth file. This is a file you download to your computer and so if we update this map then you have to download it again. Here is how you can download the Google Earth File and get it working on your computer.

Step 1 - Download Google Earth Pro on your computer. Here is the link: https://www.google.com/earth/about/versions/#earth-pro

Step 2 - This is a link to the Indiana Biking Map file for Google Earth Pro.  You can double click on it to open it and your computer will ask if you want to open it with Google Earth Pro.  You click yes.

Step 3 - Finally you need to go to the Google Earth Menu and click FILE - SAVE TO MY PLACES Once you do that then you will have the biking maps on your own google maps and you can modify that as you wish.

Below is the link to the file….it is safe….it is coming straight from Google.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AWgHhd7CcGRo2JfPxpC7kMu1FMrRANLK/view?usp=drive_link

Now you have this file ready to use on your Google Earth Pro app on your computer.

There is another Mapping universe you may want to explore

openstreetmap.org - Open street maps is an open source mapping project that has been around for a long time. There are specialized biking layers for these maps that have been crowd sourced. The 2 most used biking layers are at:

  • https://www.opencyclemap.org/ - This map has a ton of information about cycling on it. The information is all crowd sourced and you can add info to make this map even better if you want to.

  • https://www.cyclosm.org/ - This map has a ton of information about cycling on it. The information is all crowd sourced and you can add info to make this map even better if you want to.

  • https://cycle.travel/browse - It is not that great, but I listed it because it may get better. It is fun to look at.

Monon Trail