Google Maps Street Views for 13 more cities
Today, Google announced the release of the ‘Street View’ feature for 13 more areas (one of which was Austin), and expanded coverage for an existing 6 metro areas.
Be sure to try out the panoramic images – by clicking and dragging you can get a 360 degree view from any coverage location, and you can even look up and down with pretty good range, too.
The ‘Street View’ feature of Google Maps is huge for us cyclists because it really lets us get a view of what is going on any particular street just as if we were cycling there – and the images are a lot more recent than the satellite imagery. The camera that is taking the pictures is 6 or 7 feet off the ground.
If your city has the ‘Street View’ feature, you’ll see a button right in Google Maps, just next to the existing buttons in the upper-right – Traffic, Map, Satellite, Terrain. [Which buttons you have probably depends on coverage in your particular town.]
Check out a snapshot of San Jacinto Blvd in downtown Austin, Texas. It’s a one way with a bike lane, and it’s my main route into downtown.
You can imagine where the technology is going. If we can get bicycle directions on Google Maps, then we’ll be able to actually see exactly what our route looks like from where we start all the way to our destinations. We’ll be able to actually see the bicycle lanes – which ones are ‘real’ and which ones are just stripes on a narrow garbage-strewn shoulder. We’ll be able to check out any tricky intersections, how we are going to navigate left turns, and we’ll basically become better-prepared riders.
At a minimum, this is one more tool that would-be cyclists will be able to use to get more comfortable with using a bicycle for transportation.
This Street View addition for Austin will allow the Austin Bicycle Advisory Council and the City of Austin Bicycle and Pedestrian Program to have better information available to them during meetings. And groups like Walk Austin will certainly be interested to see street-level views of many of the dangerous intersections in town.
Good stuff.
…Streetsblog LA uses a helmet cam to show us a stupid bike lane, but now we could use Google Maps Street View to get at the same information – if not in full video. Incidentally, bike lanes that end without warning – all too common, unfortunately.
