Photograph from the Bike New York/5 Boro Bike tour The 5 Boro Bike Tour is this Sunday, the one day of the year where 30,000 cyclists will have total right of way throughout New York City. The tour begins in Battery Park and ends in Staten Island after winding 42 miles throughout New York. In addition to the approximately 30,000 riders, The 5 Boro Bike Tour happens with the help of about 1,500 volunteers.......

Sure, websites like Menupages are handy when you need to line your stomach for a night of debauchery, but how do Manhattan transplants find the best place to meet up for high fives and car bombs? And how do you find the best bar to avoid them and enjoy your favorite microbrew? A new website, Beer Menus, is more than just a bar search engine; it’s a great resource for tracking down microbrews and......

Design geeks and subway enthusiasts, time to swoon: Massimo Vignelli, whose beloved and controversial 1972 subway map is in Museum of Modern Art, has updated his map for 2008 for Men's Vogue. Men's Vogue revisited the 1972 map's path:The plan was as visually utopian as it was elegant — paths running on 45- and 90-degree angles, an understated gray square marking Central Park, and type set in clear Helvetica. It was hailed as an......

As a part of greening up the earth, Google Transit will tell you the quickest way to get from Point A to B using mass transit in the city. We tried it out, starting out at 4 Times Square and ending at 770 Broadway; one might think taking the N/Q/R/W would be the quickest route -- but that person would be wrong. Apparently the best way to do this is by using your own......

While Forbes named NYC as one of the top singles cities in America last year, it turns out the reason why there are so many singles here is because women outnumber men by roughly 210,000. Things are not looking good, ladies. Apparently we are living in the worst "mating market" in the country! Richard Florida, the author of Who’s Your City?, delivers this news through the above map (which appeared in National Geographic). Perhaps......

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden has yet again set up their ever-changing map showing "the approximate positions of every Prunus specimen in the Cherry Esplanade, Cherry Walk, Cherry Cultivars Area and Japanese Garden and its current blossom status." Only five have bloomed so far, the others showing buds but no petals just yet (picture of pre-bloom). Last year the garden was bursting with color around the end of April. When we asked Anita Jacobs and......

Streetsblog has this terrific map (created by the Pratt Center for Community Development) illustrating the City Council's votes for and against congestion pricing, and laid NYC highways, subways, and commuter rail options over it. The surprising votes, according to Streetsblog, are Council members Mathieu Eugene's and Bill de Blasio's because few of their Brooklyn constituents (2.4-3.7%) drive to work, as well as Council members Diana Reyna (Williamsburg) and Peter Vallone (Astoria) since their districts......

Tourist and locals alike may be interested in this tiny map: a wallet-sized guide of over 250 public toilet locations in Manhattan. Creator Tommy Mintz says, "The New York City Public Toilet Map was unveiled on Uncle Bob's Variety Show at the Jewish Museum as part of the Off the Wall: Artists at work. After the presentation, a mob gathered at the edge of the stage to buy copies of the map!" The NY......

In the wake of the Turtle Bay crane collapse that left 7 dead and a number of buildings devastated and damaged, The Daily News has a map showing serious crane accidents from the past three years and an investigation about crane accidents have risen. In 2006, there were 19 crane accidents, and there were 29 in 2007, like a foreman "dismantling a crane...[suffering] five broken ribs and internal injuries" in Midtown and a worker being......

The Daily News put together a map detailing the number of stop-and-frisks on the subway - and the racial breakdown of these stop-and-frisks. As the accompanying article makes clear (as well as interviews with people who have been stopped - 1, 2) how cops can stop anyone , though black and Hispanic riders make up about half of the subway riding population, 88% percent of the people stopped are black or Hispanic. The NYPD......

Map from The Brooklyn Paper The Brooklyn Paper has an interesting map showing how Brooklyn's donations to Clinton and Obama have changed over the past year. Gersh Kuntzman writes, "Just-released campaign finance filings that cover the second half of 2007 show that Obama made strong inroads into 'Hillary Country,' specifically turning Brooklyn Heights, Bay Ridge, Bushwick, Canarsie and Greenpoint from Hillary red to Barack blue." In total for Brooklyn, Obama has raised almost $600,000,......

Starting point map and destination point map viewed side by side on the MTA Trip Planner website. Anyone trying to plot the best subway route to serve their departure and destination points has long since given up on the MTA website, which for years has mostly confined itself to below-ground mapping and shown a remarkable disregard for how the subway actually corresponds with the street level. Sites such as Hopstop and OnNYturf have sprung......

Photograph of a section of the Texaco map by Sybil Young/NYC Parks & Recreation For the 1964-1965 World's Fair, architect Philip Johnson designed the New York State Pavillion in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. Besides the well-known observation towers (think Men in Black) and the Theaterama, he commissioned a "130-foot-by-166-foot terrazzo replica of a Texaco New York State road map." However, after vandalism and weather, the past decades have damaged the map to the point......

Break out the dry erase board - the Sun looks at Bloomberg's Electoral Calculus by seeing how Mayor Bloomberg could potentially make a play for the White House next year. The Sun created a map (for space purposes, we put Bloomberg's head in the states he doesn't have a chance to win) and explains, "Under the right circumstances, Mayor Bloomberg has the potential to win 312 of the country's 528 electoral votes, well more......

The pedestrian, bicyclist and sensible transportation advocacy group Transportation Alternatives has just launched a new website, Crash Maps: CrashStat 2.0, which maps intersections and streets where pedestrians and bicyclists have been hit by vehicles. It's an updated version of their previous map, and when the information is presented different depending on how closely you zoom into the map. For instance, at one level, it shows crashes (those with injuries as well as the fatal......

Bryan Haggerty created a totally stripped-down version of the NYC subway map, reducing it to "expose the grand complexity of this weaving system of people movers." He writes:This reduction evokes an interesting view into the history, sprawl, and the expansiveness of New York City’s subway. Through abstraction of the subway map, the often spoke of, subway as the arteries of the city, is made unequivocally clear. No borough or neighborhood is given prominence, only......

In the 2000 census, somewhere around 150,000 New Yorkers described themselves as working in the arts, design, entertainment, and sports occupations. These people, making up 4.3% of the total working population, are the nucleus of what urban theorist Richard Florida calls the "creative class". This map, showing the density of artists and designers in the five boroughs, confirms what we already intuitively know: the creative class is centered in neighborhoods with the most cultural activity.......