Google Maps ‘Bike There’

This issue has more to do with bicycle maps (probably), than it does with bicycle directions, per se, but it’s still an important point. Our petition is primarily about bicycle directions, not maps - but maps obviously play an important role.

Check out the following map comparison (click for a bigger version). On the left is a view of Austin from Google Maps with the blue and green bike lanes highlighted (it’s incomplete, and I didn’t do red bike lanes because I think red bike lanes are worthless, or worse). On the right is a clip out of the Austin Bicycle Route map, which is in PDF format. They’re not correctly aligned, but I did the best I could.

I started recreating the Austin Bicycle Route map - the PDF - on a Google Map using the ‘My Maps’ feature of Google Maps. I thought it’d be cool to try, and I was curious what it would look like. I have even used it a bit to find my way around, but there are several things wrong with it - one of them being that it can be difficult to make out the actual bicycle lanes on the google map.

To me, the map on the right - the PDF - is the better bicycle map. The main (only?) reason it is better is because you can actually see all the bike routes clearly. And the reason you can see all the routes clearly is because of the PDF map’s white background. Compare that to the Google Map which has the grey background. The Google Map version also uses more and deeper colors for roads (yellows) and green areas (green). Those are great for directions, but they’re not so great for showing bicycle routes on a map because they just make it that much harder to see the bicycle lanes.

Myself and other folks have tried, with some success, to automatically convert GIS data from the city of Austin, and other places, into/onto Google Maps. I think it would be really cool if we could pull this off and have it look awesome. Right now, we’re not there yet, but that’s a hope.

So, how does all this apply to bicycle directions as opposed to just bicycle maps? Well, bicycle directions, in an ideal and completely awesome world, would be able to tell us which parts of the directions were which type of bicycle route - ‘easy’ (green), ‘medium’ (blue), or ‘difficult’ (red). If we want to see this ‘nice-to-have’ feature as part of our bicycle directions on Google Maps, we’ll probably need a white backgrounded Google Maps interface.

…ps - Happy Bike Month!

Bikepooling is the practice of riding your bike in the company of at least one other cyclist. It is similar to carpooling, but usually each cyclist has their own bike.

Some of the advantages to bikepooling are different than the advantages of carpooling, but they both share at least one very important aspect: the company of others.

How does a bikepool even get started? Here’s an example from RocBike.com:

A few weeks ago, we were working together on a gender awareness workshop for Beyond the Binary. We both mentioned that we commute to work by bike, and realized that we live in the same neighborhood and work in the same direction. We also, unfortunately, had both faced motorist aggression on roads designed with cars, trucks, and buses in mind instead of bicycles. And so began our experiment in bikepooling — we meet up just about every morning for 25 minutes of commuting, conversation, and adventure.

Our experience has been fantastic. This morning we ate a small breakfast together in the convenience store parking lot where we meet. We said “Hi” to people as they walked by, and shared a smug conversation about automobile repair costs. We headed out on our bikes, riding side by side down a double lane road, while the conversation continued. A couple cars honked at us at an intersection without a shoulder, but shortly after that we were turning off the busy street onto a side street and through the Public Market. From then on, it was mostly easy riding, through the north side of downtown.

I like the “smug conversation” part. 

Why is this bikepooling thing even necessary? In that same post, the good folks from RocBike have given as good a definition as I’ve seen yet:

Carpooling attempts to mitigate the problems inherent with using automobiles—fuel costs, environmental impact, traffic congestion, and parking space; to name a few. Commuting by bike eliminates these problems altogether instead of merely reducing them, so at first glance bikepooling may seem unnecessary. But bikepooling shares carpooling’s benefit of social interaction and brings a whole other set of benefits to the table—increased visibility on the road, improved respect from other road users, and cooperative adventuring. If driving a car is a passive, rote task; and riding a bike is about actually living your life; then bikepooling is a way to share the daily adventure of bike commuting with someone, to learn how to be safe and fun together, to try new routes and get into the groove of familiar ones, to laugh and play together while being ambassadors for a safer, cleaner, happier city.

The previous post on Bicycle Highways made me think, “Huh. I wonder if it’d get lonely out there on those massive bike highways?” I figured, “Nah,” or, “I could deal with it,” or, “Sounds like a great problem to have!” But I also remembered the loneliness of my first couple of days on my bike trip from San Rafael to San Diego. (Zowie…700+ miles by the time I finished!) When I started out, everything was cool, but then the weather got rainy and cold, and I was tired (I never did more than 30 miles in one go) and lonely and very sunburned and I could hardly stand up straight because of a luggage-carrying back strain/thing I got just days earlier (which actually delayed my start date by three or four days). In short, I was in a bad way. And then my cell phone service went out (Big Sur has pluses and minuses). I thought I was gonna quit the trip.

And then I met up with another southbound cyclist, and it was really cool and fun from there on out. He was definitely a strange cat–he would say everything twice–he would say everything twice–but I’m a bit strange myself, so it all worked out.  :)  Anyone who’s been part of a cycling or running group knows that the camaraderie of other folks, and the expectation and hope that you’ll get to see other folks after you get out the door, is one of the prime motivating factors that allows you to get out of bed on those cold, dark winter days. Alone time can be great, but so can the community aspect of doing things together, even just commuting.

Here’s a special bikepool that happened in Long Beach yesterday. Going to the farmers market. Man, I could go for some fresh veggies right about now.

The BikePortland folks have an entire forum dedicated to bikepooling, and the sticky post at the top titled “Welcome to Carpooling” says this:

This forum is meant for people to connect, create and get advice on setting up bikepools in their neighborhoods.

Bikepooling is like carpooling. Portland cyclist Elly Blue started one up in her Southeast neighborhood. I wrote about it on BikePortland.org and someone suggested a forum where people could connect.

So here it is. But first, here are a few things to consider when posting your bikepool (suggested by Elly Blue):

A) Your bikepool announcement should include the following information:
–Starting point
–Starting time (specify a meeting time and/or departure time)
–General route (eg, over a particular bridge)
–Other important data, eg fast or slow, beginners welcome, etc.

B) Don’t ask if anyone’s interested in a certain route/time — just invite people. You have to go to work anyway, so if it’s a weird route and nobody shows up for the first week or two, well, what do you have to lose?

__________________
Jonathan Maus
BikePortland.org

And then there is the BikePooling.com website designed to help people organize their bikepools. It doesn’t seem to be doing a whole lot of traffic yet, but maybe we can help change that, no? And, they’ve only just gone live, so I’m sure things will be picking up, now. Like every good website, BikePooling.com has an RSS feed to help us easily keep track of what’s going on. Good work, y’all! It appears to be a bit buggy, but hopefully that will get worked out soon enough.

Semi-side note: The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, the Bike the Bridge Coalition, and the Bay Area Bike Coalition and others are all working on getting a bicycle route that spans then entire length of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge (total length: 8.4 miles or 14km). This is not the famous Golden Gate Bridge, which already has bike/pedestrian access; this is the other Bay Area bridge. But the Bay Bridge is awesome. And being able to bike over it would be awesomer.  :)  If you were to bike it on a regular basis, you might want some company, so this is definitely a BikePooling-type bridge. It’s a worthwhile effort, so if you have some time, read through their websites and see how you might be able to help. San Francisco is a huge tourism town, of course, so even folks who don’t live there could have an influence by doing things like contacting the chamber of commerce and telling them you support such a plan.

I don’t have a regular commute in Austin yet, but I will be very interested to know about folks who are already bikepooling and anyone who decides to try it out, wherever they live.

One of the earliest groups (if not the earliest) talking about bikepooling was Bike Pittsburgh. Here is an article in the local newspaper about their efforts from two years ago.

That’s what I want for Austin and for every city and town in every country in the world. Having bicycle facilities that are separated from cars and trucks could help to increase bicycle use dramatically. How much, you ask? 500% in a year? 1000%? It’s possible. But we need the infrastructure.

What exactly is a “bicycle highway”? I can’t say I’m sure. I don’t even know if people really use the term. But in my mind, a bicycle highway is just that–a highway for bikes. Pretty simple. We have highways for cars and trucks, so why not create highways for bikes?

America, at least (and we have reports coming in on the McMansion/Suburban Sprawl-ization of developing countries like China), has suburbs that are pretty far away from urban work centers. Residents of these suburbs need a sustainable, future-proof way to get to work. Car-and-truck-only highways aren’t going to cut it. I’ve seen at least one study that says new highways reach capacity within five years of being built. To continue building new auto highways is to fight a losing battle. We need to do better, and we need to do something differently. Giving people a sustainable way to get to work is a great first step. People can and will bicycle ten or twenty miles to work each way. Just give them the facilities and watch it happen.

If cars can have incredible amounts of space and facilities and money and resources dedicated to them, why shouldn’t bicycles? Below is an artist’s rendition of what a bicycle highway system for Austin might look like:

This StreetFilms video talks about the importance of separated bicycle facilities:

I was reminded of bicycle highways when I found out about the Atlanta Bicycle Campaign and their tour of the Atlanta Beltline (video).

Austin will soon decide what types of rail lines it may ultimately implement. I’m all for mass transit, but I can’t say I feel particularly strongly about rail lines running at street level; I’d prefer if we started with bikeways (or greenways or bike highways–whatever you want to call them).

Then someone emailed and let me know about the Minneapolis Midtown Greenway (wiki).

Here in Austin we have the Lance Armstrong Bikeway project.

These are all steps in the right direction. I feel that 90%+ of all future funding for transportation should be spent on non-automobile infrastructure: bikeways, walkways, mass transit, and so forth. I don’t believe that spending any more money on car transportation can be justified. As I said yesterday, not one more dollar to car culture.

p.s. wow.

…looks like Toronto may be having a transit strike. So, they disallowed a bunch of on-street parking, are promoting car-pooling, and allowed for a couple of very small ‘bicycle highways’. Not sure what to say about that.

C|Net Asia brings us some cool info about the Sony PSP:

The map’s zoom-in, nine scales. A mediocre performance, not an impressive affair anyway. The most useful function for PSP model could be the pedestrian navigation and its route searching. While you are on foot, or on two wheels (bicycle; not recommended to motorcyclists for obvious reasons), you can search your shortest route through obscure back alleys and holes in the fence, at least, within the radius of 10Km.

So, you need a PSP, a GPS add-on, and some software from Zenrin, but it’s possible!

All in all, it sounds like the Sony PSP solution might be a bit rough around the edges, but I like anything that moves us towards more ubiquitous access to bicycle directions.

Also, there are rumors of the new iPhone having native GPS abilities - there already exists some ‘faux GPS’ ability in the iPhone.

And in perusing the web, I cycled across a cool blog called NaviGadget, which might be interesting to you GPS heads out there. I’m not a GPS head, myself, but I do love the iPhone - though, I’m gonna hold out for version 2 of the iPhone - hopefully in a couple of months. I’m actually curious to find out more about existing GPS devices that already provide bicycle directions - I need to do some reading.

For my future cell phone, I might also go with an Android-enabled phone if/when it hits the market. Android is basically an operating system for mobile devices/phones (wiki) - it is being developed by a group of 30 or so companies - and one of those companies is Google. The Android operating system is fully GPS-capable - the only question is whether device manufacturers will create handsets with built-in GPS capability or not. Let’s hope so.

There are lots of things going down in the mapping/GPS/directions/web arena right now, and it looks like things might really start popping in the summer (when the new iPhone is rumored to be released) - just a couple of short months away.

Speaking of GPS, I’m reminded of a cool Austin company I found out about recently - BarZ Adventures. They make these cool, little GPS-enabled tour-guide devices. Check out a YouTube video here. I like tools like this because they seem like they might be able to help excite people about walking. As cyclists, we all know how cool it is to be able to appreciate our surroundings. Hopping in the car is sometimes easier, but we roll down our windows so we can taste the air - like we would if we were on our bikes. Well, tools like BarZ’s GPS Ranger (and any GPS-enabled device) seem to me like they could have this effect of helping people (like me) to appreciate our immediate surroundings a bit more - and if we don’t like what we see, we might even get motivated to do something about it. I’m starting to believe that we all should be at least knowledgeable, if not experts in, the theory and practice of good urban design. We’ve left it to ‘the powers that be’ for too long, and now we have (sub)urban sprawl that is killing us. I’m not against suburbs or cities - I’m against poorly-designed suburbs and poorly-designed cities. More on this in a future post.

Thanks to CrunchGear for the shout-out:

Google Maps has a neat feature that will help you find driving directions or more notably public transit directions. It works quite well, but what if you don’t like either option?

Some people have started a petition to Google to include the feature to get “bike there” directions, and we think it’s a good idea.

CrunchGear is part of the TechCrunch empire (wiki).

TechCrunch covers Web2.0 companies like Facebook and YouTube and Digg and all that, and CrunchGear covers electronic gadgets and toys and iPhones and the like — including GPS-enabled devices that many cyclists already use, and we will probably want integrated with our bike directions at some point.

Speaking of Web2.0 companies, for any of you cycling (or even Web2.0 professionals), you might be interested to check out NetSquared:

Our mission is to spur responsible adoption of social web tools by social benefit organizations. There’s a whole new generation of online tools available – tools that make it easier than ever before to collaborate, share information and mobilize support. These tools include blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, podcasting, and more. Some people describe them as “Web 2.0″; we call them the social web, because their power comes from the relationships they enable.

One of NetSquared’s sponsors, Wild Apricot, is something I’ve been looking at recently - their web-based software will help you do your website (it seems to be a fairly simple, but fairly complete content management system, with blog and rss feed, etc.), some of your marketing activities (like mailing list stuff), but importantly, they also seem to help with a lot of the time-consuming membership-oriented work (like member sign-ups and re-ups, with paypal integration, events, reminders, etc.) involved with running small non-profits - like cycling associations and clubs. Oh, and it seems they could be affordable for your low-budget operation. I haven’t actually used them for anything yet, but I’m definitely thinking about it. I’ve been evaluating their stuff for almost two weeks now, and it seems solid, if not perfect. And they’ve been responsive to my 3 or so emailed questions and my 1 blog comment. Two cycling clubs that use Wild Apricot are the Petaluma Wheelmen and the Santa Rosa Cycling Club - I’m not sure what their experiences have SRCC’s experience has been with Wild Apricot [Update: Petaluma Wheelmen say, effectively, that Wild Apricot is good, especially in membership management area.] [Update 2: Santa Rosa Cycling Club have had a similarly positive mixed experience - see comments for details. Thanks PW and SRCC for getting back to us!].

[Commentary: The reason I write all this stuff about Wild Apricot is that I want the cycling community to be able to accommodate what I hope becomes explosive growth in cycling, particularly commuter cycling. Wild Apricot looks like a tool that might be able to help small cycling/pedestrian/other non-profits take care of a lot of the busy-work typically required of associations and clubs. Rather than have yourselves and other volunteers, or your one or two paid staff folks, spend time doing busywork, I think we need to do whatever we can to free up their time so you/they can do the important work of organizing events, meeting people, shmoozing people and politicians, recruiting and motivating volunteers, building coalitions, brainstorming, being creative, etc. And, content management systems like Wild Apricot can help you delegate website and coordination duties to the various folks who are responsible for particular events or programs - and it's got all that permissions/privileges stuff built-in. If you know of other companies that offer something similar to Wild Apricot, please let us know about them. Thanks!]

Back to our petition — now that most of the cycling blogosphere seems to know about it, it’s important that we can make inroads in other areas - like technology and green blogs - so getting covered by CrunchGear is a big deal.

Thanks again, CrunchGear!

…rewrote the Wild Apricot paragraph because I wrote it quickly and it didn’t make a whole lot of sense the first time around. Added the ‘Commentary’ section, too.

Trek has a few bicycle blogs, one of which is focused on commuting, advocacy, and city riding, and it’s called ‘Life in the Bike Lane‘.

I think that’s just a great thing. Almost a month ago they posted about our petition. That was a big boost when we were trying to get things going around here, so we definitely appreciate it.

Many of us are now aware that Lance is getting ready to open a potentially-commuter-focused, Trek-carrying bike shop in downtown Austin. I consider that a major coup for the city of Austin. I’m thinking that a least a few folks would have a different opinion on the likely impact of such a shop, but to me it’s a big deal not just because of the potential for inspiring the local cycling community (and politicians!) to work even harder - and to get more non-cyclists onto bikes, but for the ripple effect that such a facility could have. The Field Museum in Chicago just copied the (Paris-based) Vélib’ bicycle sharing program on a small scale - and it’s a great start, and it’s just the very latest example of just how catalyzing any one event/program/facility can be. Granted, the Vélib’ program is relatively large, now - with 20,000 bikes, but it started in 2007 with ‘only’ 10,000 bikes, and before Vélib’ there was an even-yet-smaller bike rental program called Roue Libre. Check out this NY Times article from 2001. So, to me, the important thing is to just start - to try things. We’ll work and live and learn. Once we have a toehold, who knows what can happen.

Speaking of Chicago, the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation wants people to bike to work - and is gearing up for this summer’s Bike to Work Week. Some of their main advice? ‘Plan your route well in advance‘. If you live in or around Chicago, it might be time to call the nice folks at the Chicago DOT Bicycle Program and check if they have bike route data available in electronic format. You might also want to ask them if they, too, are working with Google on getting bicycle directions going on Google Maps.

The Cambridge Cycling Campaign:

was formed in 1995 to provide a voice for cyclists in our area. We aren’t a cycling club, but an organisation of volunteers campaigning for the rights of cyclists and promoting cycling in and around Cambridge. We lobby for better and more convenient conditions for cycling, safer roads, and more people on bikes.

That’s Cambridge, UK.

They have a bunch of mapping resources, including a ‘journey planner’ to plan bicycle routes. Cool!

I tried it out right quick and it seems pretty cool. I added it to the ‘Other Efforts’ page.

Thanks y’all!

I apologize for not getting this posted sooner - they originally let me know about it almost a month ago. Sorry. 

Yesterday I spoke with someone at the Austin Bicycle and Pedestrian Program, which is part of Austin Public Works. This person said that there is ‘an ongoing effort‘ on the part of Google and the City of Austin to provide bicycle directions for Austin on Google Maps. Austin is one of the ‘test cities’.

Really.

This is not an April Fool’s joke - I promise. I’m as surprised as you.

It’s not as good as a definitive “yes - we are doing this” from Google, but it’s something. A good thing.

The person I talked to on the phone is real - I’ve met them in person.

There’s a lot of information that I don’t know - like all the details about how things happened to date, between Google and Austin Public Works, and what the actual status of the work/project is - but because I was a bit taken aback, I asked the person I was speaking to, “What should I say (on the blog)? What exactly is going on? Is anything going on? How can I characterize things/the situation?” This person said I could describe it as ‘an ongoing effort’.

So, there you have it.

Some time ago (I’m not sure how long), Austin provided Google with bicycle/traffic data in electronic format (see the ‘City of Austin Bike Routes‘ link here), and told Google that, yes, Austin would like to participate as a ‘test city’, and that Austin will provide bike route data, but that they wanted to be able to update the information before anything went live. So, Austin is working right now to update that bike route data. I don’t know what the timeline is.

So, what does all this mean?

Well, from my point of view, this is very good news, but I think we need to continue to build momentum for bicycle directions on Google Maps at least until we get official confirmation from Google that they are working on it. I was supposed to try and call Google today, since we hit 30,000 signatures over the weekend, but I didn’t get around to it (sorry). I don’t really expect to get an answer, but I’m gonna call up anyways. “Hi, yes, this is Peter - can I speak to Larry, Sergey, or Eric, please?”

But, as someone suggested to me via email a week or two ago, there is at least one concrete way to start getting prepared for getting bicycle directions on the web - somehow by someone, whether it’s Google or us or whomever - and that is to get the bike route data for your city/town/area in a digital format.

That’s a bit ambiguous, I know, but that’s about all I can offer at this point - I really don’t understand more than that. I’d strongly suggest looking at the metadata file included in the bicycle data zip file. If you are new to GIS, then this file will help you figure out the questions you need to ask, and possibly some of the key terms you need to use, when you call your public works office. You should be able to point whoever you talk to to this file. If I needed to ask my local public works department what they had going on with regards to all this stuff, I would call up and try to talk to someone who knew something about the bike map - if your town has one (and if your town has one, it’s probably in PDF format), I would ask the following:

“Hi - my name is [your name here]. I’m curious, you know the bike map? - do we have that bike route data available as a GIS layer?”

If your town does not have a bike map, then I’d probably ask something more like this:

“Hi - my name is [your name here]. I’m curious - do we have a GIS layer - the data - with information about traffic volume and things like that? I ride my bicycle a lot and I’m trying to figure out some good routes to use, so I want this data if it’s available.”

If they say, “Huh?”, then you can tell them that you want to know which streets/roads are good/better/safer for cycling, and you’d like to avoid big hills and no-shoulder roads and things like that, and that Austin has sample data that you can send them a link to if they want. You might mention something about street classifications or bike path ‘classes’. This AASHTO organization seems to have something to do with the road classification system. You never know - you might talk to someone who is friendly and helpful - and you might even learn something. At a minimum, just making the attempt will help the cause of cycling.

So, that’s probably the most important thing you could do at this point - make sure your city/town/area has bike route data available in electronic format. Once Google or whoever gets their technology/infrastructure/algorithms in place, they’re going to need data. Some of us think that Google might create and then ask for bike route data in some specific format - like the Google Transit Feed Specification - but bike route/traffic could potentially be more static in nature than Transit data, so maybe we won’t need a new feed spec. The Austin bike data zip file is, I believe, a pretty standard GIS data format - which consists primarily of a shape (.shp) file (with its other corresponding/required files). To view the data, you need ArcView, ArcExplorer, ArcInfo 8 or some other software that can read shape files. All of these ‘Arc’ products are from ESRI (wiki) - they seem to be the big GIS software player.

I just got my evaluation version of ArcGIS 9.2 in the mail - haven’t installed it yet - looks like a beast. I’ve previously installed and used lots of free and trial versions of GIS software, from ESRI and other companies, and I’ve had very limited success. Specifically, I wanted to try to convert the Austin bike route data such that I could automatically paint it on Google Maps (I’d prefer to have this rather than those PDFs). I managed to do this ‘paint job’ to some extent, but the results weren’t particularly pretty or useful. There are tools (ArcView plugins, etc.) to convert a GIS layer to KML (wiki), which you can then get to show up in Google Maps.

So, here are some ways I think we can all continue to help:

1. Make sure your city/town/area has bike route data available in electronic format.
2. Digg this petition if you have no done so yet.
3. Promote the petition in one or more of these other ways.

As usual, feel free to contact me (or just leave a comment, below) if you have questions/comments/criticism/etc. Every email is appreciated, and I apologize if I haven’t gotten back to you yet - don’t hesitate to try again if it’s been more than a day or so - spam filters aren’t perfect, and it’s possible I just screwed up and somehow missed your email.

p.s. Thanks to the folks at the Austin Bicycle and Pedestrian Program. If we’re successful at making Austin a premiere bicycling city, it’s going to be at least partly because we have good people ‘on the inside’ working hard for us.

In other Austin cycling news, there were only 100 people there last night? I’d suggest something closer to 300, myself. [Wow - was my estimate wrong! Looks like the actual number was, indeed, a lot closer to 100 - consensus seems to be at or around 120 or so, depending on when you counted - the room was pretty full, and it got really hot after while, etc. (pic).] Not an endorsement, but Allen Demling gave cyclists something to smile about when he provided, off the top of his head, detailed turn-by-turn bicycle directions for the circuitous route he would take to get to work if he were elected to city council - including many of the difficult features of many of the roads he mentioned. Was pretty funny. And now Austin has this funny-looking contraption.

Bicycle Victoria (wiki) (representing the state of Victoria, Australia) is in the news:

VICTORIA’S peak cycling body claims a major upgrade of Melbourne’s bike routes could cut car trips into the city by a third.

Bicycle Victoria yesterday released a network map to include possible new and upgraded routes as well as better facilities at railway stations.

It shows a full set of radial routes from about a 15km distance — a 30-minute bike ride — into the city.

The concept has been submitted to Premier John Brumby for further consideration.

“In January the Premier asked for new ideas to tackle congestion and this is our contribution, based on our philosophy that every bike trip that replaces a car trip cuts traffic congestion,” Bicycle Victoria chief executive officer Harry Barber said yesterday.

He estimates it could cost as little as $500,000 to improve a bike route.

“Roads need to have separation barriers and bike paths have to be made wider to cope with extra riders,” he said.

I couldn’t find a link to a map the newly proposed bicycle routes.

Bicycle Victoria has 40,000 members and 45 permanent staff. That’s no joke. By comparison, two of the largest - if not the largest - bicycle groups in the U.S. are the Cascade Bicycle Club in Seattle, Washington, with 9,000 members, and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, with 8,500 members. Zowie.

[Point of information - the League of American Bicyclists and the Adventure Cycling Association are both based in the U.S., and both have upwards of 40,000+ members. Bravo!]

VicRoads seems to be a quasi-governmental organization that basically serves as the Department of Transportation for the State of Victoria - they have some maps of bike lanes in the standard PDF format, and there is an interactive map tool, too.

I think it’s probably fair to say that the mapping tools and technologies currently available to the people of Victoria are similar in a lot of ways to the people of Texas, and people all over the world. We should all have better, more-effective mapping tools available to us, and I’m hoping Google can help us in this quest.

Our petition has definitely gotten a lot of support from Victoria (which includes Melbourne, and St Kilda, and the Espy) and all over Australia, so to all of our friends down under, good on ya! And good luck getting the funding for those new and improved bike routes.