How I rode my bike coast to coast, and the overlooked infrastructure along the way

I love riding my bike. Anywhere, and ideally everywhere. Over the past ten years I have gone on four different bike tours covering 4,500 miles, in the company of six different people. When you connect them up, the route goes from Seattle to Boston, with a loop around Lake Michigan in the middle. A cycling tour takes you places you’d never ordinarily go. You’re going at a speed that encourages observation, and you can always pull over for a closer look.

I’m not the first person to write about bike touring. If you want to hear about gear, routes, and strange encounters, there’s plenty of resources out there¹. What I can offer is my perspective as someone who thinks about infrastructure, energy, and climate change for my career and for fun. This series explores those topics as seen from a bike, highlighting the lesser-known aspects of the infrastructure and systems powering our lives and the green transition.

Day 1: When a solar farm blocked my path

This tour was special for a lot of reasons, but most relevant was that this was my first solo tour. I knew things would go wrong and I was trusting that I would be able to deal with challenges as they came up. In the lead-up to the tour, prep consisted of training rides that gradually increased in intensity, packing my gear, fixing up my bike, and designing a route. I had a general plan of where I’d be at the end of each day and what camping spots or motels would be in the area, but I didn’t book any spots in advance. Experience has taught me that shit happens, being flexible with your plans is part of the adventure. Importantly for this story, this was my first tour using a dedicated GPS head unit (the wahoo Element Bolt 2) which I had pre-loaded with a route I made on Komoot with their in-app planner plus adjustments based on my own research. I could always adjust the route on the fly from my phone and re-sync it to the head unit.

With all that out of the way, my partner and a friend graciously drove my ass to Indiana at the crack of dawn (I didn’t need to bike through Gary for the 20th time for this). We got breakfast, then I said goodbye, hit start on my GPS, and pedaled off headed for NYC, not to see a familiar face for the next 10 days!

I decided I’d push until lunch in South Bend. The morning was pretty uneventful and I eased into the trip cruising through rolling country hills. After the first 25 miles the wooded hills opened up onto windy fields. I crossed over a highway and saw a field of solar panels in the distance, what a neat surprise! While I’ve work on solar projects in my career, I don’t often visit them in person, and it’s still a novelty for me to happen upon a big one while biking. That said, I was getting a bit tired/hungry and just kept rolling on until lunch. Except I was forced to stop after all…

A Dead End!

I followed my GPS and took a turn off of the main county road and onto Spruce road. I saw this would be followed by a turn onto an unnamed farm road which would lead me through to another county road. The unnamed turn should have been my first warning, but I’ve gone on gravel access roads before without issues. In fact I biked through an active freight railyard for 2.5mi later that day without issue. So imagine my frustration when I come to the turn and see a 8 foot fence and gate blocking my way, my GPS wanted me to go straight through! I spent a minute standing around looking at the route and satellite map on my phone, then backtracked and took the long way around. Oh well.

This turned out to be the only forced re-route of the whole trip, adding 2.5 miles. At first I thought this was going to be the whole blog post: a solar farm got built and fenced off an access road in the process, isn’t that crazy how renewable development is changing rural landscapes? Except the real story of this small detour is actually much stranger.

The road was never there!

Writing this a year later, my first task was to learn about this solar project and the parcel’s history. There’s many ways to do this, but I like globalenergymonitor.org. Turns out this is the Honeysuckle solar farm, a 150MWac array built by Lightsource BP in 2024 (yes, that same BP). It’s one of 30 large solar projects already built or under construction in Indiana, almost all since 2021. Overall there’s nothing that unique about this project from first glance. What interested me is the mapping story.

You wouldn’t know there was a solar farm there from google or apple maps unless you have satellite view on, most energy infrastructure won’t show up as a named location on mapping platforms, even if you search its name, unless there’s a building with a mailing address, it’s just not relevant for most navigation. But then I noticed from an old satellite image and street view that there never was a farm road there, it only got built as part of the solar project. So, what happened?!? How did my bike GPS tell me to go where a road never existed?

A crash course in open source mapping

First let’s compare google maps to Komoot when not in satellite mode. Clearly there’s something else going on with Komoot’s map.

Komoot is showing many roads in the solar farm where Google shows none. I noticed that Komoot’s basemap is from OpenStreetMap, while Google has their own proprietary map. If you haven’t heard of Openstreetmap.org I’m thrilled to be the first to tell you, although you’ve likely used OSM map data for years without noticing it. In short, this is the Wikipedia of maps, fully open source and community built by dedicated volunteers. Instead of being just a navigation tool, OSM attempts to capture all the world’s spatial elements. It’s not just mapping roads, it’s mapping sidewalks, all levels of political boundaries, land uses, and infrastructure. I first encountered it while minoring in Geography in undergrad when our GIS class did a volunteer session for HOTOSM.org, mapping previously unmapped structures and dirt roads in remote areas of the developing world to support in humanitarian response efforts. If you’re someone like me who gets a kick out of editing wikipedia once and a while, it’s incredibly satisfying to contribute to a big opensource map of the world.

Now that I knew Komoot was using OSM, I visited OSM.org to see what was going on with the solar project. By viewing the metadata for the access roads, I learned a contributor had mapped it all out in great detail already, but using satellite images from April 2024 when the array was still under construction, when there were considerably more dirt construction roads and the fence hadn’t gone up yet. The access roads were not marked as private. This was the map Komoot used and these entries were what caused my routing issue, so you know I had to fix it myself. So I logged in, read a brief how-to article on their website, and started editing.

After 30 minutes of editing I hit save and my changeset was uploaded, done! It took about a week for the changes to show up on Komoot. I checked the route planner and was happy to see the issue was fully resolved, no other cyclist would have to deal with this. There are many annoyances in my life that I just have to live with, but at least I can fix this one!

The Bigger Picture

Here’s where I’m really going with this. This is just a small example of how our world is always changing and maps are a reflection of that. All maps are wrong, but the right map can be useful. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this issue arose from a solar farm either. Clean energy development represents a major change in land use patterns. Solar, wind, and batteries introduce new categories to maps and changes more land area faster. A coal or nuclear plant might take 5 years to build and occupy 25 acres, our solar farm occupies 1,300 acres and was built in a year (50x the affected area in 1/5th the time). That doesn’t even consider wind, where turbines, power lines, and rights of way become layered on top of operating farmland, further blurring the lines between agricultural and industrial land uses.

I say all this because what gets shown on a map, and how it is depicted, can influence our mental maps and beliefs about our world, which in turn influences our behavior in the real world. This gets at a much bigger topic² but hopefully you can understand why this matters.

With that in mind, let’s consider an example directly comparing how different types of infrastructure get mapped. LaSalle County, Illinois is home to a huge nuclear power plant owned by Constellation, right next to Grand Ridge Energy Center, owned by Invenergy and consisting of wind turbines, solar panels, and a battery storage facility. See the comparison screenshots here:

Although they are much smaller than the nuclear power plant, the batteries and wind turbines with their access roads are visible on the left in the satellite view and OSM. OSM also highlights the battery facility and wind farm operations & maintenance building in pink, giving it the same treatment as the nuclear generator. Google maps view only shows the nuclear facility and the substations, the wind turbines and batteries just don’t get mapped. Similar story with the solar array which is out of frame.

Ok but why make this comparison? The nuclear plant is massive, it makes more power and has been around for longer, of course it should be more prominent on maps. Maybe? But not necessarily. For one, google maps does not need to show you either of these things. If the map is just a tool for public navigation, private access roads are just noise, but it includes the nuclear plant’s access roads and not the wind farm’s. The decentralized nature of renewable energy is certainly harder to map, but wouldn’t that make it even more important for emergency services, what if there’s a need to respond to a fire or medical emergency at a wind turbine? I think what’s really happening here is a combination of things, way more people visit and work at the nuclear site and it’s owned by a public company. The wind farm wasn’t around when google maps first mapped the area, and the smaller turbine access roads are likely just leased from various farmers. There’s plenty of reasons google maps a wind farm differently than a nuclear or coal plant without needing to get conspiratorial.

But navigation not the only use of digital maps anymore. People post reviews and images at places of business, people look for landmarks in the landscape along their routes to help orient themselves, and we also use digital maps to understand the world and our place in it. If a mapping service didn’t show building footprints or bodies of water, you could still find your way from A to B, but for the most part we’ve come to expect those from our digital maps.

There’s no perfect answer, and OSM is not really a more “correct” map, they have different purposes. Google maps could add every utility pole and power line, but it would become harder to use and less useful as a navigation tool. Indeed, if I had just used Google maps on my trip, I wouldn’t have hit that dead end. But still, these decisions can bias our mental maps of the world, and different approaches tell different stories about how quickly our world changes. Every inch of space in our world is full of countless layers of complexity, having been worked over by people, creatures, plants, and physics forever. Nowhere is truly “open” or “empty”, but what we notice depends on the maps in our hands or in our heads. Its only when the world changes, and our maps can’t keep up fast enough, that we’re forced to confront this.

Where I’m Heading:

Whether you enjoyed this, couldn’t follow it, learned something new, or have more questions than you started with, thank you so much for reading. I’d truly love to hear your feedback on this format, my writing style, and any topics you’re curious for me to explore in future posts. Here’s a sneak peak of some other topics I’m considering at the intersection of energy and bike tours:

• Amish communities embracing off grid solar while opposing utility scale solar projects
• The legacy of FDR’s rural electrification program and what it means for a Green New Deal
• What can coal plants learn from rails to trails? Adaptive reuse for clean energy parks
• The only wind farm in the upper peninsula of Michigan, why is it such an outlier?
• Long coal trains and big dams in big sky country Montana
• What small town Pennsylvania’s history of oil & gas can tell us about technological lock-in

1. adventurecycling.org;
   reddit.com/r/bicycletouring ↩︎
2. Ström 2020, “Journey to the centre of the world: Google Maps and the abstraction of cybernetic capitalism”;
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics;
   https://youtu.be/5MyCtvSBATI?si=bfvPnECsoWJNbU-f; https://monoskop.org/images/e/ea/Margaret_Mead_1968_Cybernetics_of_Cybernetics.pdf ↩︎