Comments on: Submit your bike data to Google

By: John Gordon

John Gordon — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:45:31 +0000

Fantastic work. I’ve never seen this information laid out before.

I was surprised to find people complaining that we shouldn’t give this data to Google. I have many complaints about Google, but they also do me a great deal of good. It’s an imperfect world.

Congratulations on your role in moving Google to now implement the new map layer. You are a hero of the net today.

By: Ian

Ian — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:50:36 +0000

“Why should we help make Google richer. It is like donating to Walmart. Do these maps and directionjhs is very good, but they are not a public service organization. this should be being done by our government with our tax money, rather than a war in Afghanistan.”

The government won’t do this for you. Plus I think doing it this way will produce better results.

Also government maps usually only cover urban areas. What happens when you want to ride *gasp* outside of the city? How do you plan a route then? Answer Google maps.

By: john b

john b — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 19:23:54 +0000

because it would take 5-10 years to get anything from the gov’t and it would be laughably unusable and unconnected to anything else i wanted to use.

By: Joe Berry

Joe Berry — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 00:56:11 +0000

I agree with Tim. Why should we help make Google richer. It is like donating to Walmart. Do these maps and directionjhs is very good, but they are not a public service organization. this should be being done by our government with our tax money, rather than a war in Afghanistan.

By: A

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 00:06:02 +0000

SF’s bike lane info can be downloaded from the city’s site: http://gispub02.sfgov.org/website/sfshare/index2.asp

(As pointed out in the notes to the excellent SF bike route mapper, http://amarpai.com/bikemap/bikemap.html, thanks Amar)

By: Tim C-B

Tim C-B — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 18:49:42 +0000

Wow! An awesome new opportunity for people/orgs to give a huge private search company exclusive access to their data for no money in return. (Sorry, snark!)

Glad you mentioned that data “should be free free free” — this can’t be emphasized enough.

By making data publicly available in standard formats, organizations can open the possibility for anyone to create innovative applications for the benefit of their constituent communities.

Transit agencies that have publicly released their data (in Google’s own GTFS format) can see their data incorporated in applications like this, deriving benefit for their riders:

http://www.walkscore.com/transit-map.php

It’s great that Google wants to build this into their maps, but organizations — especially public or non-profit ones — should make their data available to everyone, not just Google.