How BikeTheRail works

Rail-trails are the easiest long rides in America: flat, car-free, and often linked town to town. Finding reliable information about them is harder than riding them. BikeTheRail gathers every rail-trail it can find into one open dataset and keeps it current without a paywall.

Where the data comes from

1. Every night, the loader downloads the latest OpenStreetMap extract for each state and keeps the paths that run on former railways, trolley lines and canal towpaths.
2. Segments are grouped into named trails, using OpenStreetMap's route relations where they exist and trail names where they don't.
3. State park and transportation datasets are cross-checked for trails that OpenStreetMap is missing. Those go on a public gap list for mappers.
4. Changes from official sources (closures, reopenings, new sections) become observations that a person accepts or rejects before they appear here.

What the labels mean

A rail-trail runs on a former railway. A trolley trail follows an old streetcar or interurban line. A canal towpath is the path mules once used beside a canal; many are flat and bike-friendly, so they are included and labeled. A greenway is an honorary member: a car-free path with good riding that isn't on a railbed.

Not yet verified means the trail is from map data alone and nobody has checked it against the managing organisation yet. That is most trails right now; verification is where help is most useful.

Support

The site runs on open-source software and costs almost nothing to host. Trail-town businesses and tourism offices can sponsor the pages for their trails; placements are always labeled and never change the data. Write to [email protected].

Use the data

Every trail page offers GPX and GeoJSON downloads, and the whole index is at /data/index.json. It is licensed under the Open Database License, like OpenStreetMap: use it freely, credit BikeTheRail and OpenStreetMap contributors, and share improvements under the same license. The code is on GitHub.