Is your town
mappable?
One thing decides it: whether the aircraft laser survey covers your square. If it does, we can map it. We also tell you how hilly it looks, but that is information, not a verdict.
Most of the country has been flown by now, so the answer is usually yes. Where the survey is missing we say so, because the coarser elevation behind it would give grades we would not stand behind.
Everything we can map, we are mapping, free, whether anyone pays for it or not. Checking costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
A modest town is still worth mapping. Even ten good hills is ten more than anyone had written down before, and Stillwater, which nobody calls hilly, turned up 252.
Big cities are built in squares about 14 miles across rather than all at once, so you pick the part you actually ride.
Search, or just click a square on the map.
Mappable No survey coverage Already built Not checked yet
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How the check works
Can it be mapped? We ask the national survey index whether full-resolution laser data covers your square. That is the whole test. Any square it covers can be mapped, however flat it looks.
How hilly is it? Separately, we sample the square in a lot of places and measure how steep the ground gets over short distances, since that is what you can actually ride. We deliberately do not compare the highest point to the lowest: by that measure western Kansas beats Stillwater, because it picks up the slow tilt of the plains rather than anything with a hill in it.
For scale: Stillwater comes back with almost half its samples steep enough to ride and has 252 real hills. Somewhere reading "few hills" will turn up less, but it will still be the only map of its kind for that town.
Checks are cached, so a square already measured answers instantly. Payment is not wired up yet, so nothing here charges you.