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

Yahoo has a new ad campaign called “Start Wearing Purple“; the main theme song is Start Wearing Purple by the band Gogol Bordello. Great song.

Part of the new ad campaign is a set of custom-made bicycles, colored purple (Yahoo’s primary color), that automatically takes pictures and uploads them to Flickr (a photo-sharing website that Yahoo bought) with a mounted digital camera. The pitch: “Bikes + Flickr + GPS + Purple + holy moly”. The bikey contraptions will capture “the life of a bike” in various towns across America (San Francisco, New York, San Diego, Jersey City, and Bethel, Vermont) and a few spots around the world (Copenhagen, the UK, Sydney, and Singapore).

The images in this post are taken from the Purple Pedals Owner’s Manual (pdf).

LifeHacker has a pretty extensive write-up on the bikes.

The main URL for the Purple Pedals project is at http://startwearingpurple.com/purplepedals, but be warned—the site is heavy with Flash (i.e., for users with slower computers, the site is very sluggish).

There are lots of “Street Views” we can’t get from Google Maps because some paths are off-limits to cars, so this can actually fill out some gaps in the terrain. Here are the pictures from one of the San Francisco bikes.

Seems like a fun project. Bravo to Yahoo! for generating more excitement about bicycling!