Mid-June can be a perfect day for a bike ride, and Sam Mattson, a 25-year-old Yankee Hill resident, decided to take advantage.
Around 11 a.m. Wednesday, Mattson began a 16-mile bike ride around Milwaukee, which had been intricately mapped in advance to create the shape of the state of Wisconsin. The drive took him about an hour, two hours if you include the stop for coffee at the Community Market Coffee Shop.
On Wednesday afternoon, Mattson posted about his ride on X, formerly known as Twitter. The post has more than 1,800 likes and was reposted by Visit Milwaukee.
The Wisconsin-shaped route was first created by Mattson’s friend, a software developer who used a program that allowed him to draw an outline of the state and place it over Milwaukee’s street grid to create a route. Mattson said his friend originally created it as a joke, but Mattson took the route created by the program and manually modified it to make it safe and logical.
Drove the shape of Wisconsin on Milwaukee’s Streets today! I loved seeing so many neighborhoods and different streets than I would normally drive on. pic.twitter.com/M89Ke2pK2G
— Sam 🚲 (@rexilsv) June 12, 2024
“It was fun,” Mattson said. “I’ve seen a lot of streets where I normally wouldn’t cycle.”
Mattson and some of his friends use the app Wandrer to keep track of the Milwaukee streets they’ve driven; it has become a kind of friendly competition to see who has completed the most. With this ride behind him, Mattson says he has now cycled 10% of the city’s streets.
Although Mattson doesn’t consider himself an avid cyclist, the carpenter and painter said he cycles to work as often as possible and usually cycles everywhere else. He calls himself a “transportation advocate” and is a member of Critical Mass Milwaukee, a group that organizes large protest rides calling for safer streets for cyclists, pedestrians and other non-highway users.
Mattson said he hopes to use the Wisconsin-shaped route for a Critical Mass ride next year once construction along it is completed. The route takes in many quiet, residential side streets, and overall he said the route was “pretty safe” and “quiet.”
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This article originally appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: This cyclist rode a Wisconsin-shaped bike route through the streets of Milwaukee
