Summerfest, on Milwaukee’s lakefront, bills itself as the World’s Largest Music Festival. Running from June 26 to July 6 this year, it has multiple stages booked with music from noon to midnight daily. It also has a long history of providing free parking for bicyclists right in front of the Mid-Gate entrance to the grounds.

This year Summerfest is going green and part of the greening effort is to encourage more ticket holders to bike to the festival. Bikeverywhere teamed up with Summerfest to create a map of bike routes to the Summerfest grounds from three directions (Sorry, no bike routes across Lake Michigan.). The routes start 5-6 miles from the Summerfest grounds and follow bike friendly roads and bike paths to the Chicago Avenue bike parking lot. The map is a distilled version of the Milwaukee and SE Wisconsin Bike Map created by bikeverywhere.

You can download a free copy of the map from the Summerfest website, or right here. Bikeverywhere has also supplied free paper maps to Milwaukee area bike shops.

The goal of this promotion is two fold. The obvious goal is to encourage more cyclists to ride their bikes to big, fun events like Summerfest. We believe that a cyclist only has to avoid parking hassles and slip past traffic once to appreciate the value of the bike when attending a large event like Summerfest. The bigger-picture goal is to show other events, both large and small, that providing basic necessities, like free parking and good route maps, will encourage cyclists, therefore reducing the event’s needs for ever bigger parking lots and traffic control expenses.

For bikeverywhere, the goal is very simple. We want more people to live the bikeverywhere motto. So give it a try. Download the free Bike-to-Summerfest Map. Pick out a route and ride to this incredible music event. And if you want to start further out, consider purchasing a Milwaukee and SE Wisconsin Bike Map. You could plan a route from as far away as Lake Geneva or Kenosha. Now wouldn’t that be fun?

For the record: Bike parking is fenced and a guard is stationed at the lot during festival hours. You will still have to bring a lock for your bike. The fencing and the guard are extra security measures provided by Summerfest.

It didn’t take long for alert readers to notice that I forgot to include the finished part of the Badger State Trail between Belleville and Purcell Rd. No excuses for that oversight. In the process of converting the map into GIS format I overlooked the missing trail. My apologies. Click here for a free pdf file showing the proper location of the trail on the map. Badger State Trail

This is a fund raiser for the Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin presented by Trek Bicycle Stores of Madison. The evening starts with a bike ride from the Trek Bicycle Store East to the Eastgate Cinema to see Klunkerz, a movie about the rise of mountain biking from its Marin County roots. Fischer bike founder Gary Fischer will be in attendance and will ride with the group to the cinema. Considering the size of Mr. Fischer’s ego, and his relentless efforts to establish himself as THE founder of mountain biking, expect the movie to feature him prominently.

After the movie, a drawing will be held for a Gary Fischer Monona bike. All proceeds go to the Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin.

Bobmbay Bicycle Club will be offering more rides east and south of Madison this year in addition to their full complement of rides in the gorgeous, but hilly western part of Dane County. The club is also offering a Leisure Ride series for the casual rider. the new initiatives are designe dto broaden the appeal of the club beyond its core of extremely fit and hill loving riders.

The new 2008 Madison and Dane County Bike Map is now available. It’s working its way through the distribution system right now and should be available in bike shops within a couple of weeks. You can also order it here right now. This year we’re also offering, online only, a laminated version of the map. The thick, 3 mil, laminate makes the map sturdy enough to hang from a wall or use as a route planner. Stop by the store and take a look.