Google Maps “Bike There” Petition
We’ve gotten the heads up on this petition from Rhino, Bill and Benny. It is also all over the bicycle blogosphere:
To: Google, and the Google Maps team
We would like a ‘Bike There’ feature added to Google Maps – to go with the current ‘Drive There’ and ‘Take Public Transit’ options.
The feature would take into account actual bicycle lanes from the locality being mapped, and it would automatically plan a route for a bicyclist, possibly even providing the cyclist options for either the most direct route, or the most bicycle-friendly (safest) route. The Google Maps-based third party site, byCycle.org (http://byCycle.org/), provides these features for two metro areas – Portland, Oregon and Madison, Wisconsin, and there are countless other mapping initiatives around the world aimed at accomplishing the same goal. We hope that Google will consider building this feature into the core Google Maps service…
More info on the folks leading the petition at: googlemapsbikethere.org
Bike-specific routing capability in Google Maps would be a great feature. It is interesting to note that here in the PHX area, the ‘Take Public Transit’ option isn’t offered yet (the list of cities with public transit routing in Google Maps is actually pretty limited).
My opinion is that the cycling community asking Google to add a “Bike There” option to Google Maps is a fine idea. However, the cycling community need not wait for Google to act. As byCycle.org demonstrates, any group can build bike route mapping capability into Google Maps by taking advantage of Google’s very powerful Google Maps API. Anybody want to take a crack at mashing up the Tempe Bike Map?
