The loneliness of mostly-abandoned Route 66 is all the more cutting for the towns that once thrived along its 2,448-mile length, many of which declined or dried up altogether when it was decommissioned in the 1970s and ‘80s. The famous route that brought migrants west during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and served as a symbol of the open road in later decades became irrelevant with the construction of new highways, and while some states have incorporated it into local roadways, many stretches were left to crumble. Now, the United States Bicycle Route 66 is set to revive it, following roughly the same course.

The first official sections of this new recreational route opened in June 2018, starting in St. Louis and running across Missouri before cutting through a narrow 13-mile slice of extreme southeastern Kansas. These segments are part of the U.S. Bike Route System, a developing national network of officially recognized bicycle routes around the country. If the other six states of the original Route 66 get on board, it could become one of the longest bike routes in the nation, connecting to other key bicycle touring routes like the Transamerica Trail (USBR 76) and the Mississippi River Trail.

That’s great news for cyclists, not to mention the towns most affected by the decline of Route 66, which could see new tourist activity. Plus, the new bike route will likely be joined by additional development and protections in the future, since the U.S. House of Representatives officially designated Route 66 a National Historic Trail in June, promising federal oversight and funds for preservation and promotion. Towns like Peach Springs and Seligman, Arizona, which flourished and then floundered as they were bypassed by new highways, could amp up their Route 66 nostalgia tourism for cyclists, too.

Not that bicyclists don’t already follow the path of Route 66; it was mapped by the Adventure Cycling Association in 2015, and adventurers made their way across it before that, too. But signs are hard to come by, and in some segments, riders have to cruise along the shoulder of I-40. The new segment of the official bike route is paved and marked, running alongside lots of tourist stops packed with memorabilia.

CityLab has more details on the new Route 66 bike route. To learn more about the history of the road, check out ‘Could new legislation lead to a Route 66 economic revival?’ on The Conversation.

Using a mapping algorithm coupled with citizen reviews of sights and scenery, a team of researchers has developed a way to choose paths through cities based on beauty, quiet and happiness rather than simply the shortest distance between two points.

The project employed Google Street View and Geograph as well as Flickr images and their metadata to build out an initial estimation of probable best paths, then solicited human feedback (to check and enhance the results) from a group of participants on the website UrbanGems (shown above).

The study, published by Cornell University’s arXiv, came up with a number of route suggestions in Boston and London and contains a number of interesting findings. For starters, the ‘beautiful’ routes were only slightly longer than the shortest routes, and significantly shorter than typical tourist-oriented directions and guided-tour paths. As the algorithm improves, it is increasingly able to generate paths through new cities via metadata alone, reducing reliance on input from people.

The project’s creators included Daniele Quercia and Luca Maria Aiello of Yahoo Labs in Barcelona and Rossano Schifanella of the University of Torino, Italy. From their abstract: “When providing directions to a place, web and mobile mapping services are all able to suggest the shortest route. The goal of this work is to automatically suggest routes that are not only short but also emotionally pleasant.

The assessments are not simply qualitative value judgments, but a hybrid of human and machine input: “Based on a quantitative validation, we find that, compared to the shortest routes, the recommended ones add just a few extra walking minutes and are indeed perceived to be more beautiful, quiet, and happy.”

From UrbanGems: “Buildings and neighbourhoods speak. They speak of egalitarianism or elitism, beauty or ugliness, acceptance or arrogance. The aim of UrbanGems is to identify the visual cues that are generally associated with concepts difficult to define such beauty, happiness, quietness, or even deprivation. The difficult task of deciding what makes a building beautiful, or what is sought after in a quiet location is outsourced to the users of this site using comparisons of pictures. With a comprehensive list of aesthetic virtues at hand, we would be more likely to systematically understand and re-create the environments we intuitively love.”