Google has finally added bike trails/routes to their map interface. Please click here to check out the routes near you!
Sign the petition here to show the importance of cycling as a mode of transportation.
There are many reasons why this feature is a wonderful edition to Google Maps. Among them, some of the most influential would be to:
* Make bicycling safer for millions of bicyclists around the world.
* Empower world citizens to better adapt their lifestyles to face the challenges of global climate change.
* Help Google realize its core mission of 'organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful.
The addition of trails is incredibly valuable. The streetview and satellite information have long been a powerful tool for bike route planning as well. I've used those features with great enthusiasm for several years.
ReplyDeleteBut the new bike route feature leaves me cold.
This morning a reader sent me a route it concocted for her, it was worse than awful. It routed her via narrow, 2-lane roads (roads I would avoid) to find short sections or trail. It routed her against traffic on an unenhanced sidewalk that it had listed as a bike path. Then treated her as a rolling ped through one of our worst intersections for peds, then sent her down a narrow shoulder on a 6-lane highway. After going out of its way to send her through a part of town with intolerant drivers just to piece together "bike facilities," it inexplicably dumped her into an extremely complex high-speed interchange with no facilities.
I've run a couple other tests on it against my own routes (seeking an aggregate of the most comfortable roads possible). So far, I'm not impressed.
Metroplan has a much better tool here: http://bikemapping.edats.com/
It doesn't make your routes for you, but it does give BLOS information.