FREE Bike Trails Maps

This page is dedicated to FREE bike trail maps and information.

If you have visited other pages on this site you will know that I live in Illinois and mostly have Illinois and Wisconsin bike trail information (for now, at least). So I am going to start with consolidating the free information links that I have on the other specific bike trail pages.

Most of the free bike maps are available through various government, county and municipal sites. Some of the best free maps that I have found for Illinois are by county. Unfortunately, county lines are not always at convenient starting and stopping ride locations so you may need to go to multiple county web sites to get a series of connecting trail maps.:

www.dot.state.il.us/bikemap/state.html - The Illinois Department of Transportation (idot) site has the best (printed) FREE Illinois Bike Maps that I have found to date!

I ordered 3 Illinois bike maps from this site and received the free printed bike maps (these are really good maps!) in about 3 weeks... So the downside is that it takes a while (after all it is a "government" site...) but the good side is they are truly free and they are great maps...

I think my favorite map, for our area, is the "Illinois Official Bicycle Map Chicago/Northeastern Illinois ". On the "IDOT" site (above) you can also limit the map to a specific area (county, city, trail, etc), zoom in and print the maps, but the quality is not all that great... But it is still a good online map resource also.

www.lcfpd.org - The Lake Count Forest Preserves Site has great online maps in the bicycling area (choose Activities > Bicycling)

www.fpdcc.com - The Cook County Preserves Site has great online maps n the bicycling area (choose Recreation > Bicycling)

Note: I am not including the direct links to the bicycling pages or map pages because these sites have a tendency to change periodically which breaks the links and just causes frustration. If you go to the main site though it is usually not too difficult to find the maps with the hints that I've given above.

About-Bicycles.com - Bike Trail Photos

If you are looking for photos of the trails, come back to this site. I believe that we have one of the more extensive and better collections of bike trail photos for the bike trails in northeastern Illinois and quite a few Wisconsin trails too!

That's all I have right now, but I'll be adding more as I discover them. If you have more free bike map resources please let me know... (Rob at about-bicycles@homekat.com)

If you are aware of the fact that the state, county and municipal web sites usually have the best free bike trail maps, it can really help you to filter your online searches to the truly free maps.

There are quite a few fantastic internet resources for FREE bikes maps, but they can be hard to find with a typical Google or Yahoo search since all of the bike sites that are SELLING bike trail maps try hard to get to the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) for phrases like "FREE Bike Trail Maps", "Free Bicycle Trail maps", etc. So, I decided to start a page dedicated to truly free bike trail maps and information.

Although this bike site does have some commercial pages and resources (primarily helpful links to sites that actually sell quality bike accessories) I am reserving this page to free, non commercial resources.