Google Maps ‘Bike There’

New bicycle sharing program about to start up in Luxembourg - Vel’oh! (in English).

And, a video for your viewing pleasure:

One more reason to visit Luxembourg!

Two folks have recently let us know about ViaMichelin.com - a mapping service by Michelin (wiki) that seems to provide bicycle routes.

John Symon, writing for Pedal Magazine, says:

Meanwhile, Viamichelin.com, a French based website, already seems to offer the services that Smith is requesting of Google.

The first page of the Michelin site offers the choice of large number of countries, including Canada. On the left side of the screen is a box to be checked for those people traveling by bike. A few test runs of the website by Pedal produced adequate bike riding directions between various Canadian locations, including this reporter’s apartment in Montreal and the Prime Minister’s residence in Ottawa. While Michelin missed a few bike paths and shortcuts along the way (the bike paths are not cleared of snow at present), it certainly avoided major highways and gave detailed information about the travel directions. The total 190km trip was estimated at 13 hours and 34 minutes. By comparison, the Trans Canada Trail bike path between Montreal and Ottawa takes the scenic route at about 400km.

These virtual directions by Michelin correctly suggested leaving Montreal Island to the north, following unofficial bike routes such as Ste Croix and O’Brien Streets before briefly following Quebec Highway 117. The suggested route then follows Highway 148 and many secondary roads around Mirabel Airport and crossing the Ottawa River at Hawkesbury and following Ontario Highway 17 to Ottawa. This reporter, who has produced a guidebook of bike routes around Montreal, was astonished at the precision and veracity of this suggested route.

That’s a pretty massive thumbs up if I’ve ever read one. I’d suggest reading the entire article.

For bicycle mapping services, I was thinking more along the lines of city commuting, where there may be explicitly-designated bicycle lanes, etc., but that doesn’t make the long haul route mapping any less valid. It just so happens that my particular world mostly involves city commuting, but I definitely think we need maps for everywhere - city and non-city. In fact, the bicycle route information only gets more interesting and fun when you start to consider what each of us might be able to achieve - some folks can/will/do commute 20 or 30 miles to work each way, every day. And the suburbs need our help as much as the cities.

In email, Craig writes:

I thought your efforts were commendable, but wanted to let you know that viamichelin.com already has a feature that does this. I’ve used it in our area, and it’s pretty good, except of course it does not have bike paths or sidewalks in its database. But it definitely keeps you off of highways, high traffic areas, and other undesirable cycling situations. Pretty impressive for a worldwide map system.

I actually don’t know which city/town Craig was writing from, but that’s awesome that ViaMichelin seems to work for him.

So, I tried it out myself and was pretty skeptical at first, but after doing more testing, it seems like it might do a reasonable job of providing bike directions. I’ve only done testing for downtown, Austin, so far, so I’ll be very curious to know how well it works for everyone else in your respective towns. I tried about six routes - the first was not good, but neither was the Google Maps ‘Avoid Highways’ option - both were much less than optimal. But then I tried a succession of routes, each further from my apartment. The results were mixed, but there definitely did seem to be a ‘method to the madness’. I couldn’t really decipher the algorithm (the decision-making process) that ViaMichelin was using, but that doesn’t mean much. I would very much like to know how they’re doing it - but I suspect they want to keep that information private. In each case, the route seemed to be attempting to follow designated bicycle paths, but seemed also to give consideration to the quality of the particular bicycle path (here in Austin, green==good, red==bad).

Which brings me to a quick aside - red bike routes in Austin are designated as ‘low easy of use’. That means, “High traffic volumes, narrow lanes; or difficult connections, May function as a barrier to cyclists.” Personally, speaking from my limited experience riding red bike routes here in Austin, I don’t consider these safe - I’d rather travel on the roads that are not designated on a bicycle map as ‘bike routes’ at all. That’s a particular qualm I’ll take up with the local biking scene/city government, but it actually made me wonder if I was reading the map correctly. Am I? To me, these red bike routes are something less than ’safe’ for bicyclists. Los Angeles using a ‘Class’ system, with ‘Class III’ being the ‘least best’ of the cycling options available - in other words, ‘Class III’ are the ‘red routes’ of LA. Or are they?

All that said, does Google or any other mapping company release information on how they calculate routes? Or is this just information that is well-known in the industry? Maybe there are some industry-standard formulas used by traffic engineers and other folks to calculate traffic flow, safety, etc.?

When you first go to the ViaMichelin site, you’ll probably see the French version - but just click the flag of the language you’d like to see up at the top of the page - for English speakers, use the Britain/UK flag. An America flag pops up on the next page, but clicking that will take you to viamichelin.us, where the route mapping product seems to go away. It almost seems like ViaMichelin is only kinda-sorta covering either the US, or North America, or maybe anyplace outside of Europe?? From their ‘Who are we?‘ page:

Unique content with a European dimension

ViaMichelin provides exclusive mapping coverage - over 42 European countries, from national road maps to detailed town plans.

The regularly updated European database contains some 7 million kilometres (4.4 million miles) of mapped roads and streets (including towns and cities down to street-level detail).
In addition, ViaMichelin highlights and describes some 18,000 tourist locations and 62,000 hotels and restaurants, as tested and recommended by The MICHELIN® Guide inspectors throughout Europe.

Finally, ViaMichelin also provides information on weather forecasts, traffic reports, service station locations…

So, there definitely seems to be a European bias. That is not a knock against the service - it’s just trying to figure out what it’s all about. For instance, does this mean that the bike routes provided for non-European cities can, in general, be relied upon? Are they as valid as European routes? If not, how so?

I’ve sent an email to ViaMichelin, using their contact form, to try to find out.

All in all, though, this is a very positive development. Some major corporation has gone to the trouble of providing at least some information to bicyclists about what options they have for getting around - the quality of that information for different locales might be up for debate, but at least they’re trying. And, as for my personal quick tests with ViaMichelin, it seemed to do about as good a job as I could expect. That is, downtown Austin, in my humble opinion, is a not great for bicycle commuting, so I couldn’t look at the PDF of the Austin Bicycle Map and pick out a route from Point A to Point B that would have been obviously better than what ViaMichelin was suggesting. Maybe it’s just luck on the part of ViaMichelin, or stupidity on my part, or bad/disconnected bike routes in downtown Austin, or maybe ViaMichelin is doing the best possible job we could ever expect any semi-automated bike route mapping technology/service to do?

In ViaMichelin, I now have a couple of locations and routes saved. The interface uses some of the good AJAX technology that we know and love in Google Maps. It even offers download of routes in GPS format, so you can import it into your GPS device if you have one (and if you don’t, I’m sure Michelin would be happy to sell you one).

So, I think this is definitely a positive development, in general, because individual cyclists might be able to get new/better route information than they have had to date - but I’m also a little ambivalent about it. As much as I appreciate the efforts of ViaMichelin, it’s still not Google Maps, and Google Maps is what I use almost every day, often multiple/dozens of times a day. After I’m more familiar with Austin, I’m sure that ‘multiple/dozens’ figure will go down significantly, but Google Maps is now an integral part of my online life, as I’m sure it is for millions of others.

[Sorry for the rambling post. And please forgive on any comment wackiness - the spammers found us pretty quickly, and we've been changing the spam settings around. A sure-fire way to get a comment on is to just register - that cuts down on spam massively, though we do know it's a pain.]

Thoughts?

From cyclelicio.us:

Everybody will be joining the memorial ride for Kristy Gough and Matt Peterson tomorrow.

Martin Krieg and his gang will leave the BusCycle garage in Palo Alto at 1 P.M. for the six mile ride to Foothill College, where they’ll join the “official” memorial ride to Stevens Canyon.

At the request of ride organizers, the Santa Clara Sheriff’s department will escort the ride down to Stevens Canyon, and Stevens Canyon Road will be closed during the duration of the ride. The county sheriff bike patrol will also join the ride. Alto Velo/Webcor will provide course marshalls to direct traffic at busy intersections.

Free parking will be available at Foothills College in Lot 1 (the lot nearest the football field) from 2 PM to 6 PM.

The media WILL BE PRESENT at the ride. Organizers are asking everybody to ride in an orderly fashion and keep the group as tight at possible.

The ride will take place rain or shine. The temperature will be in the low fifties and rain is likely Saturday afternoon.

…post-ride report.

Just want to offer condolences to all the people - friends, family members, communities - who were affected by the recent deaths of cyclists in Cupertino, California, and elsewhere around the world [The Cupertino incident is on the mind of American cyclists because of proximity, the strong Bay Area cycling culture, and the details of the incident itself, but we are aware of other accidents in the Bay Area and around and outside the US.]. We also want to offer a ‘Get well’ to those cyclists who are now recovering.

There is nothing else at all intended to be implied/inferred in/from this post - it just felt bad being silent about these recent incidents when so much of the bicycling community has been so deeply affected.

So, I’ve been out looking for meaningful work, and I stumbled upon this listing:

Con-way Enterprise Services, located in northwest Portland, includes the company’s Information Technology, Finance and Administration teams. The Enterprise Services campus borders The Pearl, near Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital in Northwest Portland and includes an employee gym with locker rooms and showers, two cafeterias, secured bicycle barn, and free parking. Our Total Rewards package includes medical, dental and vision coverage, life insurance, disability, 401(k) with company matching, stock purchase plan, and TriMet subsidy.

[My highlight.]

Kinda cool, no?

Companies in bicycle-friendly towns like Portland, Milwaukee, and Berkeley are looking to lure bicycle-friendly employees.

…weird how once you get familiar with a name, you start seeing it up up everywhere. Con-Way in the news.

I am told that “the best recumbent site in the Netherlands has a newsitem” on our site:

(10-3-2008) Google maps met fietsinformatie?

Er is een werkgroep gestart in Februari die graag de informatie in Google maps uitgebreid wil krijgen voor de fiets. Interessant!

Google Translate says that this is German for:

(10-3-2008) Google Maps with Radinformationen?

In February, a working group went to work, which like Google Maps for information for cyclists extended wishes. Interesting!

I’m assuming the ‘Radinformationen’ (a translation of ‘fietsinformatie’) stands for ‘bike information’.

Check out the cool little recumbent Google logo.

Hey - it may be the only recumbent site I know of, but it’s obviously the best!

Thank you, Ligfiets.net!

Just how crazy is it? I’d be curious to see per capita bike industry growth numbers today vs. what took place during the energy crisis of the 1970s.

According to Wikipedia, there was more than one previous bicycle craze.

Sometimes you’re just kinda happy to be involved in something so positive. So, I get happy when I see bicycle blogs growing out of their original server digs, or hear about towns that sprout three new bicycle shops in a single month, or sign a bicycle maps petition that seems to find its way to 1,000 more people every day.

A cool non-profit I stumbled upon just now:

OUR MISSION: EMPOWERING PEOPLE

Simple, sustainable transportation is an essential element in disaster assistance and poverty relief. Bicycles fulfill basic needs by providing access to healthcare, education and economic development. Bicycles empower individuals, their families, and their communities.

Our mission is to provide access to independence and livelihood through The Power of Bicycles.

I guess I hadn’t really thought of bicycles as being a tool for humanitarian/development projects.

Bicycle ambulance?

Bicycle that sharpens knives?

Bicycle that transports and cleans water?

Cool stuff!

The price of oil is helping to put the squeeze on people, and it’s just a real bad situation. When you read the accounts of people who are losing or who have recently lost their homes, you kinda think to yourself, ‘man, that’s bad‘, or ,’this is not supposed to happen‘.

I actually don’t know the situation in the rest of the world, but here in America, foreclosures are just about out of control - lots of people in lots of cities and towns all over the country are losing their homes - and this problem is not just about people losing their homes - it’s the myriad other problems that come with massive amounts of foreclosures:

The mortgage foreclosure crisis has caused a drop in cities’ revenues, a spike in crime, more homelessness and an increase in vacant properties, a survey of elected local officials out today shows.

About two-thirds of 211 officials surveyed by the National League of Cities reported an increase in foreclosures in their cities in the past year, according to the online and e-mail questionnaire. A third of them reported a drop in revenues and an increase in abandoned and vacant properties and urban blight.

“There’s a reduction in revenues at the same time that more services are needed,” says Cynthia McCollum, president of the National League of Cities and councilwoman in Madison, Ala., a suburb of Huntsville. “Because of foreclosures, people are stealing, crime is on the rise and we don’t have more money for cops on the street.”

While it might not be fair to suggest that a feature addition to Google Maps could save millions of Americans from losing their homes, I do think it is fair to suggest that a ‘Bike There’ feature addition could really help those people who were determined to not lose their homes by doing whatever they could to fight off foreclosure - even if it meant giving up their car.

People could sell one of the family cars, which could mean giving up a car payment, insurance payment, gas payments, maintenance and upkeep payments, etc.

The problem, of course, is that folks have no reason to think that they could cycle to work - it hasn’t entered the public conscience yet - for many reasons. And that keeps folks in their cars, because the only alternative to a car, they believe, is taking mass transit everywhere, which equates to a loss of control. When you ride a bicycle, you are still in control - an important and compelling distinction for which the bicycle has not yet been given its proper due - in my humble opinion. I pass people sitting or standing at bus stops all the time, and I know they’re thinking about it - ‘could I ride a bike to get where I need to go?‘ And then they think, ‘Nope - too dangerous.‘

A Google Maps ‘Bike There’ feature can help, here, by showing people realistic bike routes that have already been designated as such by cities and towns and organizations all across America and around the world - routes where there may even be a full-on bicycle lane so that you don’t have to dodge cars and SUVs and pickup trucks to within inches of your life.

The implementation of a ‘Bike There’ feature does not have to mean that Google is evangelizing bicycles over other forms of transportation - it could just mean that they’re responding to tremendous market demand - and that would be fine with me - and that’s part of what this petition is all about. I believe that tremendous market demand exists - this petition is just a way to fuse the millions of voices from around the world into a unified show of support for such a feature.

I drove up north of Austin, yesterday, to an area of town known as The Arboretum - an ‘upmarket retail trade area‘. There is just lots of ’stuff’ out there - stores, restaurants, movie theaters, hotels, etc. In driving the mass and mess of highways to get there, I thought to myself, ‘man, if I wanted to go shopping up here, there’s no way I could bike up here’. It just seemed too crazy - just thousands and thousands of cars zooming around in every different direction - I couldn’t think of a place I’d less rather be when riding my bike.

But all of this might have been false thinking. If I was able to pull up Google Maps and have it provide bicycle directions to The Arboretum, the route obviously would have been much different. The ‘Avoid Highways’ checkbox would be useful, of course, but it would not go far enough. If I was able to look at bicycle directions on Google Maps and see that a bicycle trip was possible, then what other trips would become possible? How many other Austinites would see the ‘Bike There’ option on Google Maps and think ‘I wonder if I could do that?‘.

Lots of Americans know they need to take drastic measures to avoid foreclosure, and sometimes, even selling your car won’t help, but it would be great if we could give folks just one more tool to help keep themselves afloat.

Monday, March 10:

Bicycle sharing programs are sprouting up like crazy. Check out the Tulsa Townies bicycle sharing program, created by the Saint Francis Health System. Not sure I would have gone with the hot pink, but at least they are out there doing it.

Humana has started the Freewheelin program in Louisville, Kentucky. No website, but a good intro/PR/announcement video, and a nice pdf.

There are bicycle and safety and environmental advocates/activists gearing up all over the country to convince their local governments that bike-sharing programs are good. Check out Bike Share Philadelphia for an example.

The wiki page has more on bike sharing programs.

The Bike-Sharing Blog is run by a private bike-sharing company. They put together a Google Map with a list of bike sharing cities/programs in Europe.

News of bike-sharing programs making their way to the U.S. has been around for months, but actual rollouts (pun intended) are imminent, starting in DC, with myriad other towns all across America wanting to get in on the action.

Check out this awesome video about the Parisian bike sharing program, Vélib’ (English, wiki). And an older article from the IHT on Vélib’ -’a name that fuses the terms “vélo” (bike) and “liberté” (freedom)‘.

A search of the web or just the blogsphere will show just how much activity is going on with regards to bike sharing in America and around the world.

Bicycle routes directly integrated with Google Maps would be of great use to people all over the world right now - but when we take into account the rapid growth of bicycling all over the world as a real form of transport, this feature only becomes more important.

When we look back at the worldwide bicycle movement twenty years from now, I think there will be at least one effort that people will point to as being a crucial component in leading the way - in helping inspire people everywhere to believe that bicycling was possible and healthy and fun - and that will be the Vélib’ program. The question is, will Google be remembered as one of the key enablers of the worldwide bicycle movement?

I hope so. 

SXSW is ‘South by Southwest‘ - the annual interactive (web, mobile, internet, etc.), film, and music festival that takes over Austin for a week or two every March.

BikeHugger.com is a website we’ve mentioned before, after they helped popularize our our efforts. According to their website, they are:

…bike culture blogged. As a group blog, with different voices, we cover diverse topics, but all focused on bikes.

Well, they had planned a big bike ride and barbecue down here at ‘South by’ (pronounced ’south bye’), and it was….great success!

At the Bike Hugger BBQ, there was a capacity crowd that ate all the food, drink all the beer, had a good time, and won prizes from our sponsors. We counted 300 people. 30 cyclists showed up for the Urban Ride on a beautiful Spring day. I made it just in time for the BBQ, but missed the ride, after being stuck in Memphis.

Thanks Austin and SXSW.

ATXBS blog was there, too (I think ‘ATX’ is just a nickname for Austin - a conjugation of ‘Austin’ and ‘Texas’.). It was great meeting Jason and the ATXBS crew, and Byron and the BikeHugger crew.

I missed the beginning of the ride, but managed to beat them to The Blanton Museum of Art (which didn’t have bike racks). No bike racks, but the folks inside were very nice. The Texas State History Museum also did not have bike racks - I’d originally stopped there, thinking it was the Blanton Museum. I definitely plan on calling the city about getting bike racks in both locations.

We cruised for some dinner a bit later on (just beer for me, thanks) - we went to El Chilito - a very cool joint. Again, no bike racks, but the place was so cool I could almost forgive them. I’ll find a way to ask them to install a bike rack, anyways.

I’m typing this post from a new cafe I discovered along the way (another benefit of riding vs. driving) - Clementine Coffee Bar. No bike rack here, either - I’ll ask someone about it Bike rack off to the side! It definitely seems we need to have a systematic way of contacting business owners and expressing our desire to get bicycle racks.

The picture is taken outside of El Chilito. The guy with the cool bike is Jason, of ATXBS blog fame.

Thanks to BikeHugger for organizing this event, and to everyone for making it such a fun event.