Google Maps Bike There…for a safer, healthier, happier world. :-)

This is not just hearsay—this has really been released into the wild, in Beta (test) form, for a few users in a few different cities. Google Operating System blog has a screenshot, and News.com backs it up.

The one curious thing that jumps out at me is the lack of a “Public Transit” option on the screenshot; there is a “Drive” option and a “Bike” option. Not necessarily all that interesting, but curious. Once you start talking about walking or biking directions, you have to start planning for true multimodal transport directions—being able to get a route based on your specific walk/bike/mass transit/drive preferences.

This is a great development. We’ve talked before about how we need to put pedestrians at the top of the transportation hierarchy (something which not everyone may agree with), and this new feature will help us to do that. Our FAQ #9 addresses walking directions. Lots of people who signed the petition, left comments on this blog and other blogs, and sent emails were very interested in walking directions, so I’m very happy to see that they are finally getting them, or hopefully will be shortly.

A lot of the expertise that Google developed and/or acquired to make this happen can only mean very good things for our efforts to see bicycle directions.

In the meantime, we can hope that Ride the City continues to fill out their offering, and then expands it into our cities and towns.

A quick aside: a company that works in the “online directions” space, based out of New York, is HopStop.

So, a hearty congrats to the Google folks! We wish them the best of luck in rolling this out around the world. Let’s push for bicycle directions next!