Showerspass Cycling Jacket with London Map

London’s street network appears on a new cycling jacket – when you shine a light at it!

Showerspass, a Portland (Oregon)-based company, has unveiled two new versions of their Elite cycling jacket – “Hi-Vis” and “Torch” versions (each of these are available in Women’s and Men’s cuts). Both of the designs contain MapReflect, which is a rather brilliant idea for using a map design as a reflective panel. The map is a stitched together pattern featuring the street networks for various different cities, including part of London – specifically Whitechapel, Wapping and Rotherhithe in east London, as well as part of the River Thames’s most famous wiggle. You can see the London section in a couple of places – as well as on the main part of the jacket (see bottom photo), it appears on a sleeve:

The Hi-Vis jackets are predominately neon green and have the map section in their side panels and underside of the sleeve in two versions – Silver Reflective, where the road/pathlines are black and the spaces between the roads is reflective, and Black Reflective, where the road network itself is reflective, on a black background.

The Torch jackets have the colours reversed, so the main body of the jacket is reflective, with the street/path network overlaid in Black. These are pretty intense when you shine a light straight on!

More about MapReflect on the Showerspass blog.

Showerspass approached me a while ago about obtaining the map graphic, which I put together for them. It’s OpenStreetMap data (© OpenStreetMap contributors) for a number of city centres, woven together. The cities chosen include London and Portland, as well as other cities known for a strong urban cycling culture and a regular high density of streets in their centres.