Thursday, February 28. 2008

Google: Please Add "Bike There"

A statewide bike advocacy e-mail list circulated a request to sign a petition that encourages Google to add a "Bike There" option along side it's "Drive there" and "Take public transportation" buttons for getting from A to B. You can find a link to it at Google Maps Bike There.

I'm a bike commuter and recreational rider, so I'm all for more information on the safest, "best" routes. My questions are:

Has Google ever added content to Google Maps because of a petition? I'm not saying this won't work, just curious about a precident.

How labor intensive will it be to collect bike route data in comparison to say public transit data? I know there's bike data out there and more and more communities are hiring bike coordinators (my city and many neighboring ones do) but pulling together nationwide or even big-city wide data is a challenge beyond public transit.

What's the return for Google? As much as we love to think Google Maps is all about us, it's at least in part about advertising.

Could/should this be a mapplet? I know this means it's not right in the interface, but it'd be available and perhaps quicker to implement than waiting for Google to take up the challenge.

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As you already noted its all about getting the data. And Google isnt setup for crowd sourced vector data.

However OSM (www.openstreetmap.org.uk) clearly is setup to get this data. IN fact there are already efforts to create tailored maps
http://www.gravitystorm.co.uk/osm/
routing on it is just the next step.

But once OSM has the data, and it might take a while to reach critial mass, then Google and use its considerable infestructure and maybe rendering, to create this 'Bike There' feature.

So this 'effort' in my opinion would be better at the moment working on getting the data organised (ideally thought OSM), as it stage I dont think it technically possible for Google to put it in maps yet

#1 Barry Hunter (Link) on 2008-02-28 07:19 (Reply)

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