Google Maps ‘Bike There’

Google told us last month that they were working on bike directions, but they didn’t make a big deal out of telling us how to help. Well, I could be mistaken, but it looks like the offer to ‘partner’ on bike directions (and all sorts of ‘mappy’ features) is just sitting there, waiting for folks to get to it.

If you speak ‘nerd’, or know someone who does, then the rest of this could apply to you. There are some high-level FAQs about data formats, and a link to a form to fill-out if you have some data and you want to partner with Google to get your data integrated into Google Maps. The data we most care about here, of course, is bike-related data — bike lanes, routes, paths, etc.

Who has bike data? Well, cities and bicycle coalitions, probably — and/or the folks who hold the copyrights on maps/data, if they are copyrighted. [Of course you know how we feel about this type of data -- it should be free free free.]

If you are a planner/GIS-type person in the Bicycle division of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, then maybe you can help Google get us some bike directions — just fill out the form and see what happens. Could the good folks of our local bike coalition (the folks who put out the bike map) possibly work with Google to get this done? Got me — there’s one way to find out. [SFBC is up to 11,000+ members, now.]

Whatever city or town you live in, do your best to convince someone — I’d start with your local walk/bike/transit advocacy organization, if you have one — to contact the city/town/municipal government and ask them to follow up on this.

What does bike data look like? A lot of it is over my head, but we can look at Google’s “Complete Map Content Specifications“. There are lots of details, of course, but the human-understandable parts are very cool. If you’ve wondered what the GTFS format for bikes was going to be, we may have our first draft.

Can the data format handle wide curbs vs. bike lanes vs. one-ways vs. two-ways vs. high-speed arterials vs. bike boulevards vs. contraflow lanes vs. buffered bike lanes? I’m not sure, but it looks like it’s pretty flexible and can handle most if not all of the crazy configurations and complexities that occur in road networks.

New roads and bicycle and pedestrian paths

Google is presently accepted two specific types of network data: new roads, and bicycle and pedestrian paths.

• Use a segment-based representation: a segment is part of a road between two intersections. We can not accept roads that have multiple intersections hanging off of them.
• The street format is similar in many ways to the address format, with the exception of the different street number format.
• All address ranges should be specified relative to the the geometry (that is, the right side is to the right of the path from the start of the segment to the end of the segment).

The following fields are useful for roads and bike and pedestrian paths. Fields marked as “optional for BP” are not necessary for bike and pedestrian paths:

Field	Description	Example values
ID	A unique and stable identifier for the road segment	Any alphanumeric string (e.g. “14232514″)
AR_RT_FR (optional for BP)	Starting address on right hand side, relative to geometry	42
AR_RT_TO (optional for BP)	Ending address on right hand side, relative to geometry	58
AR_LT_FR (optional for BP)	Starting address on left hand side, relative to geometry	41
AR_LT_TO (optional for BP)	Ending address on left hand side, relative to geometry	57
ST_NAME	Street Name and Type (the words Street, Avenue, etc., can be abbreviated)	Powell St
ST_NM_A1 (optional)	Alternative Name 1	U.S. 101
ST_NM_A2 (optional)	Alternative Name 2
NEIGHBH (optional)	Neighborhood Name	Union Square
CITY	City Name	San Francisco
STATE	State (Two Letter Abbreviation)	CA
ZIP (optional for BP)	5-digit zip code	94108
CNT_NAME (optional)	County Name	San Francisco
CNT_FIPS (optional)	County code (see here and here.)	06075
ONEWAY (optional for BP)	One-wayness – relative to the direction of geometry	“None”, “To-From”, and “From-To”
PRIORITY (optional for BP)	We would consider the following levels: interstate, federal/state highway, expressway, minor arterial, local, not intended for public traffic.	minor arterial
LANES (optional)	Number of lanes	2
SURFACE (optional)	Road Surface	Paved or Unpaved
SPEED_LM (optional)	Speed limit in MPH	55
AVG_SP (optional)	Average Speed	25
CAR (optional)	Cars are allowed on this segment?	Allowed, Small vehicles only (mopeds etc), None, Disallowed
PEDEST (optional)	Whether the segment allows bikes, and if so, what type it is	One of: Trail, Walkway, Mall, Sidewalk, Wide Shoulder, None, Disallowed
BIKE (optional)	Whether the segment allows bikes, and if so, what type it is	One of: Trail, Bike Lane, Wide Shoulder, Recommended, None, Disallowed
SEPARATED (optional)	Whether the road is separated by a barrier in the middle	Y/N
TURN_R (optional)	Turn Restrictions (or see below for exact format)	Freeform text
ELEVATION (optional)	If the road is elevated, or a bridge or a tunnel	One of: bridge, tunnel, overpass, underpass

We are happy to accept turn restrictions as freeform text to make it easier for people to submit data as turn restriction formats can be very complicated. We can accept turn restrictions in any format. However, to assist, here is a model format that would typically be delivered as a CSV file or a DBF file:

Field	Description	Example
FROM_ID	The ID (see the id column above of a road segment) of the segment where the turn restriction starts	14232514
FROM_END	The end of the segment the turn restriction applies to relative to its geometry.	Either “FROM” or “TO”
TO_ID	The ID (see the id column of a road segment) of the segment where the turn restriction ends	14232599
TO_END	The end of the segment the turn restriction applies to relative to its geometry	Either “FROM” or “TO”
MODE	The mode of transportation the limitation applies to.	Either “ALL”, “PEDESTRIAN”, “CAR”, “TRUCK”, “BUS” or “NON-HOV”
START_TM	The start time of the turn restriction, in 24 hour notation. Leave this and END_TM blank for permanent restriction	06:00
END_TM	The end time of the turn restriction, in 24 hour notation. Leave this and START_TM blank for permanent restriction	10:00
TYPE	Type of turn restriction	Either “NO LEFT TURN”, “NO RIGHT TURN” or “NO U-TURN”

Special thanks to The Tri-State Transportation Campaign (TSTC) (wiki), who just blogged about our petition (thanks, y’all!), and in doing so, they implored us to assist Google if our help was requested. The TSTC is sort of a group of transportation/environmental/sustainability superheroes and their respective organizations from the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut areas (the ‘Tri-State Area’). They work on all the sorts of things we care about, and it seems like lots of important people have worked with them or for them at one point or another. [Janette Sadik-Khan was on their Board of Directors.] It was their blog post that made me re-examine Google’s Data Format/Submission site.

Congratulations, y’all! 50,000 signatures!

We hit that number about a week or so ago, thanks to ‘Jessica’ — the 50,000^th signature.

Shortly after we hit the big 50k mark, Google made a small announcement on their LatLong blog:

The best part about this new dataset is that we’ve been able to add a lot of new, detailed information to Google Maps – information that helps people better explore and get around the real world. For example, college students will be pleased to see maps of many campuses; and cyclists will now find many more trails and paths to explore. Soon we even plan on providing you with biking directions to take advantage of this new data. Of course, in the true Google spirit of “launch and iterate,” we plan to work with more data sources to add new features in the map.

Now we’re all curious to see the first cut. If there is a city or organization working with Google to provide them actual bike-specific street data (say, on the relative ‘bikiness’ of certain streets, Class I/II/III, contra-flow routes, etc.), I haven’t heard about it yet — but that’s not saying much, as I’m usually the last to know.

Ride the City, who originally provided mapping directions in New York City, followed by Chicago, now provide bike directions for Austin — that bike-crazy town smack dab in the middle of Texas:

Even if you haven’t been there, you might have heard that Austin is great for bicycling. According to the bike gurus, the League of American Bicyclists, Austin is the only city in the whole state of Texas worthy enough to receive a ranking in their Bicycle Friendly Community program. (The City comes in as the 15th best U.S. city for bicycling, and for that it gets a silver badge.)

Well, we’re hopeful that bike riding in the Lone Star state is going to get even better today as we launch Ride the City – Austin: www.ridethecity.com/austin. Put your hands together!

We’d like to thank all those who helped during the tweaking and clean up of the data to improve the routes. We especially thank Nathan Wilkes and Jason Fialkoff, both of Austin’s Bicycle Program, and bike advocate Tom Wald. These guys gave excellent feedback and helped to comb through the routes to make sure the most common local routes are accurate. Thanks guys. (Some day we’ll show you one of Nate’s hand-drawn maps, really cool.)

We hope that Ride the City – Austin will make bike riding a little bit easier in another great American biking town. So pass it on and, remember, if you test a route and find a glitch or a better way please come back to rate it/give comments on the “Feedback” tab so we can continue to improve the site.

Notice they’ve made the switch from Google Maps tiles to OpenStreetMap tiles. Because the OpenStreetMap tiles have fewer of the yellows and other bright colors of Google Maps, your bike route is easier to see — at least it seems that way to me. So, that’s a big plus.

Props to everyone who got it going.

Austin is a great town, and it just got a bit greater. 

Give it a whirl!

Built by a $1 million federal grant to Greater Chicago’s regional transit agency, the RTA, this planner will eventually/allegedly include car, bike, walk, and mass transit directions. Right now — no bike directions.  

Read more about it, here.

Or, just go check it out for yourself at http://goroo.com/.

Google Maps Mania tells us about Google Japan’s Street View Trike (adult tricycle). It’s in Japanese, but we love the idea!

Hopefully we’ll be getting some awesome ’street views’ of walk and bike paths. After that, we’ll need the bike directions to go with them.

Google UK is doing some of the same, but their press release seems to suggest the project is not so much about shooting non-street paths, but popular tourist destinations. We’ll see.

The University of British Columbia has a ‘Cycling In Cities‘ research program that produced, among other things, a cycling route planner based on Google Maps. Cool stuff.

And the CBC got some of our tech/research heroes on camera:

[Download full video here (.wmv).]

The most interesting part of the planner to me was the survey results showing that cyclists’ primary concern in selecting a route was to find one with low air pollution. It’s possible I read/viewed that incorrectly, but if true, that would seem to be an important factor in cycle route planning that I never even once considered as being important to us cyclists.

As best I can tell, Vancouver seems to be the Portland of Canada — fairly progressive biking policies, relatively speaking. Maybe that’s why Vancouver was just ranked 4th best city in the world for livability.

For more info on how the route planner fits into the overall research program, and links to all sorts of other interesting data/analysis, check here.

The Google Maps Help section has a ‘Send Feedback‘ link that allows you to vote for new features you want to see on Google Maps. One of them is called ‘Add bike trail information and biking directions’. Please feel free to head on over the click the ‘Suggest’ button next to this feature.

To navigate there from Google Maps, click the Help link in the top-right, then ‘Send Feedback’ on the right.

The ideal would be to vote for (’Suggest’) just the ‘biking directions’ feature — that would probably help make it stand out a bit better — but feel free to vote for other features you really really really want, too. 

If you’re feeling particularly frisky, you can head over to the Google Maps Help Group and ‘Post a question’ to the ‘Features Requests / Suggestions‘ Google Maps Group. Any details you add about why you want this feature and how you would use it are a great way to show support for this feature — it really helps the engineers and product managers at Google know what you want. So, you’re answering the question, “If Google Maps adds bicycle directions today, how will I use them tomorrow to get where I need to go? How will they help make me safer, my life better, etc.?”

I know I’ve posted in those groups before, but I’m going to try to get back in again with a good example. For whatever reason, I can’t seem to get a good mental map of San Francisco in my head, so I’m constantly heading to the San Francisco Bike Map hanging on my wall to figure out how to get somewhere. It usually includes leaning over furniture and zooming my face into the wall, trying to get a close-up of street names and things like that.

Thanks for the heads up, Donny!

Miami pulled off their first ciclovia, and we heard they were going monthly, but now we have more evidence to suggest the Mayor will follow-through on that commitment.

It’s incredible, really. Monthly ciclovias. Just like that.

And in Miami, of all places — so car-choked as to look almost helpless against the onslaught of motor traffic. And they’re doing it – taking back the city.

Miami is sun-drenched, has good population density, and is currently the 43rd-ranked city in population size in the U.S. Miami has the potential to become a great bicycle town.

Governor? President?

A new meme I’d like to see propagated far and wide is that politicians and other professionals seeking higher office can get to that higher office a lot easier if they pay attention to making streets more livable. More livable streets, more complete streets, where bikers and pedestrians can get from point A to point B in safety – this is what will be a politician’s best chance of success at winning their next race.

StreetFilms has a cool new video featuring New York City’s streets and one of the people making it happen, NYC Department of Transportation Commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan:

Soon-to-be-Mayor of Portland, Sam Adams, was a certified bike nut councilperson before achieving his Mayoral position.

As Mayor of Seoul, the President of South Korea tore down a highway, and that helped pave his way to higher office.

Across the US and around the world, those politicians and professionals who pay attention to the needs of their citizens by making streets more livable will find that these folks – and that is most people who live in a city and state – will support that person for higher office or to stay in office.

The Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, wants to run for a third term. It’s very controversial because voters approved a term limit of 2 consecutive terms in office – so Bloomberg is supposed to be out after this term. I don’t know where livable streets fans will come down, but I spoke to at least one person who recently took a trip to New York City and reported back, “I couldn’t believe it – there were bike lanes everywhere.” That is sure to make a lot of people in New York City a lot more open to a third term in office for Mayor.

It looks like Bloomberg has just won the right to run for a third term. Whether you like it or not, I think it’s important to consider the job he’s been helping to do in transforming New York City’s Transit system into something a lot better – especially for bikers and pedestrians. How much easier was his job of winning a chance to run for a third term because of all the streets-changing successes?

Now that Bloomberg will run, what about Janette Sadik-Khan? Should she run for governor?

Maybe Bloomberg will end up running for President in 2012?

What could someone like Janette Sadik-Khan do if she was head of the Federal Department of Transportation, instead of people who only care about protecting the car and road-building lobby?

And why not a person like Janette Sadik-Khan for President of the United States? Who would be more qualified?

You’ll also notice in the StreetFilm that New York City is not building new, gaudy bus rapid transit (BRT) systems – not in the sense that they are being marketed all around the U.S., anyways. Of course, part of that has to do with the Federal Department of Transportation rubber-stamping those systems because they are less expensive, up-front, than light rail systems. But the important part is that New York City is effectively building some of the best parts of a BRT without the incredible disruption (and ugliness) that traditional BRT systems promise. I still think that bicycle access is being crowded out in favor of buses – an obvious mistake – but at least New York City seems to be doing it less incorrectly that most other cities.

StreetFilms has two previous videos on BRTs – one from Bogota, and one from Paris. If you’re a livable-streets/bicycle-type advocate, you’d better educate yourself on these things in a hurry because if you live in any mid-sized+ town in America, you’re about to get run over by a BRT system. What New York is doing seems sensible. What San Francisco and Oakland and many other cities around the U.S. and world want to do – install ‘immersive ugliness’ by building high-speed bus lanes that crowd out bicycles and pedestrians and snuff out city diversity – is not sensible.

The Sustainable Cities Plan that Sadik-Khan mentions at the end of the video can be found here.

For all the livable streets work they’ve done, bravo to Sadik-Khan, Bloomberg, StreetFilms, Streetsblog, Mark Gorton and Clarence Eckerson, and the entire crew of advocates in New York City.

This post is directed a bit more to Americans than a typical post might be, and that is because America can be fairly isolated from goings on in the world, by accident or choice, or just the reality of our physical separation from much of the rest of the world. But the message goes for everyone in any city or town that does not yet participate.

Let’s start celebrating World Carfree Day! (more).

I wasn’t too surprised to find out that most of America, it seemed, had never even heard of World Carfree Day. That’s September 22nd, every year, no matter what day it falls on. It just passed us by about three weeks ago.

Many of us here in America and Canada know about and participate in Bike-to-Work Day, which typically occurs on the third Friday of each May. That’s fine; it seems to work for raising awareness of the bike as a valuable form of transportation. But doing something on a global scale—participating in solidarity with our brothers and sisters across the globe—can have a larger impact.

And with World Carfree Day, the idea of biking is not tied to just transporting yourself to and from work. It is about imagining a world without cars, without the need for cars. All forms of transport—even walking!—can join in. And it helps us build an awareness of the need for intelligent urban design, the lack of which helped get us to this disastrous point in the first place.

There have been lots of social movements that started as local social movements somewhere else in the world, like Ciclovia (and, I’m happy to report, cities in the U.S. and Canada have jumped all over this movement). By joining forces with people the world over, we can build worldwide momentum for more fairness in transportation. By joining forces with the people of the world, we not only elevate the awareness of the destructive nature of automobiles, but we are better able to sense that this is ultimately an issue of doing what is right—it becomes something larger than just “getting dirty cars off the streets.”

Americans have now been pointing to Bogota, Columbia, as an inspiration in changing our cities and towns into more livable places, and now I want to help return the favor to the rest of the world.

In many parts of India and China, a growing middle class has an appetite for cars. Some people in these places and others (like America) have the idea that driving a car is glamorous or “respectable”—that it makes one special and shows that one is dignified and classy. They got that false image from American television and movies.

By joining in the World Carfree Day Movement, Americans can explicitly reject the notion that cars are anything but an especially toxic form of cancer. The good news is that it is a curable form of cancer, as many cities and towns throughout the world are now starting to demonstrate.

So get in touch with your local bike and/or pedestrian organization and float the idea, and let’s make sure Canada, America, and the rest of the world join forces for World Carfree Day 2009.

The author of Traffic says this:

An interesting piece from the New York Times on the growing problem of handling older drivers who shouldn’t be behind the wheel. It’s quite striking how people, in the U.S. at least, take driving to be some kind of inalienable right—rather than possessing the ability to operate heavy machinery in a safe manner.

To me, this is a no-brainer. It’s obvious. Who in the world wants their freedom taken away?

I’ll tell ya what: In the future, if any of my kids or grandkids or step-kids or the neighborhood kids or anybody else tries to take away my freedom—my bicycle—I won’t be talking to them for a lot longer than two months. Or, more likely, I’ll just be on my way to pick up another bike later that day.

In all seriousness, though, this is a very real problem.

And I would not want to suggest that we should put seniors on bicycles when it is generally not safe to do so in what can be very challenging road conditions in many parts of the world, but it does give seniors another option. The simple fact of the matter is that right now, in many instances, if you take away a senior’s car keys, you take away their freedom. It’s a brutal reality. It’s just one more reason we need to change things, and change them quickly.

Enter the Portland Office of Transportation (PDOT). They created a program that is giving seniors another option. The official name of the program is called “Older Adult Three-Wheeled Bicycle Program“:

In the video, Oregon Health and Sciences University is mentioned as being a partner of PDOT’s, doing research on how physical activity affects aging.

BikePortland.org covers the program here. A local Portland paper picked up the story here.

The trikes ideas was something we’d mentioned earlier. With the help of organizers in Portland and New York (StreetFilms), we might be able to see this thing spread.

It would be awesome if we could get the folks in the great state of Miami to get out ahead of this idea and put it into action during their upcoming Ciclovia. Maybe there’d be more support for a public/private partnership of some kind. It seems like the Mayor down there is ready to go. Seeing some older folks out on trikes enjoying themselves during the Ciclovia might be the one aspect we’re still missing from our movement; cycling should be for everyone. And not every town is blessed with an adaptive cycling center, but we should support these folks, too.

You’ve had a problem, and now you’ve been formally recognized for it:

HOUSTON — Houston has joined Los Angeles to become the second place in the nation classified as having a severe smog problem, the Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday.

The EPA reclassified the smog problem in the eight-county Houston area from moderate so that the region has an extra nine years to meet federal health standards set in 1997. The state was supposed to meet the requirements in 2010 but now has until 2019.

The EPA no longer considers the 1997 standard safe for public health, but agency spokeswoman Catherine Milbourn said progress toward it will protect the public and bring regions closer to meeting stricter requirements.

I’ve traveled around the U.S., and even made pit-stops in Houston and L.A., our fourth and second largest U.S. cities, respectively. I can say this without any exaggeration that the two places in America which I have heard bad-mouthed the most are Houston and Los Angeles. They are clear favorites for haters, with Houston probably having a small edge, despite it’s smaller size.

When people talk about these cities, their faces get all mashed up and eyebrows furrowed and they sometimes can’t even get the words out of their mouths. And this is over years of just talking to other regular folks – long before I was ever a bicycle nut. During my recent stint in Austin, I talked about heading (back) to Houston because I had a potential job opportunity down there, and folks would say, “No!” and “F**k that.” Or, “Sorry, man. We can not let you go there.”

I’d spent a few days there a few years ago and that was pretty much my initial impression, so I can’t say I was surprised to hear this stuff. It kind of reminded me of Atlanta, but take away all the greenery, and put down strip malls and asphalt for as far as the eye could see.

I rode my bike through parts of L.A. one time, heading north to south, and it reminded me of scenes from Mad Max. Again, even before I was a bike nut, I could tell that something was very wrong with that place. I almost fell off my bike when I noticed big oil rigs off the coast. Unbelievable.

I feel bad for all the good people of Houston who have been trying to do the right thing for years, only to have their attempts thwarted by the Houston oil people and the politicians in the relatively-clean-aired Texas capital of Austin. It’s not fair.

It’s not fair to the bike people. It’s not fair to all the kids and adults suffering miserably from asthma. It’s not fair to all the kids who are getting sick and dying early from unnatural diseases brought about by unhealthy, car-dominated lifestyles. It’s not fair to the children who have yet to be born, who will suffer miserably from toxic air quality for the first twenty years of their lives—probably just long enough to give them cancer that won’t show up until they’re in the prime of their lives. The scale of the tragedy is almost incomprehensible. And Gov. Rick Perry, the EPA, the Houston business community, and plenty of others share the blame.

But it’s not time to give up. Places like Houston and Los Angeles, which are so car-dominated that its residents can barely breathe, need our help. Even if it’s an email or a phone call to the people most responsible for suffocating those cities.

And advocates and activists in those cities need not lose heart—you can bet that if you were not there doing your work, things would be even worse. All you can do is keep fighting.