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

Just got back from TransitCamp 2—definitely a cool experience. Here’s the idea behind TransitCamp:

TransitCamp is inspired by BarCamp. Bar Camp events are powered by participation and collaboration. TransitCampBayArea will highlight the public transit system in the Bay Area Region and will bring together transit officials and citizens to discuss stuff like: getting schedules on the go, the future of the Bay Area transit system, experiences and observations (not complaints, though), the websites, cool ideas for attracting more riders, etc.

Lots of transit-type folks were in attendance: folks from transportation agencies, at least one San Carlos official, transportation advocates of all types, at least one mostly-bicycle advocate (me!), a few regular transit riders, and at least a couple of guys from the Google Transit team.

I managed to corner Joe Hughes. I’m not sure what Joe’s position/title at Google is, but it’s obvious from Googling around that he’s been heavily involved in transportation/technology issues for a while (I found this funny story after a brief search on Joe’s name.). Bottom line, he knew about our website and petition, and thought it was very cool, but couldn’t comment one way or the other on what Google may or may not be doing with respect to bike mapping. He mentioned that when they first released Google Transit in the Portland area, about 30% of the feedback were requests for bicycle route mapping. So, no new news, unfortunately.

One of the folks present at the meeting was Aaron Antrim, who heads Trillium Transit Internet Solutions. I first found out about Aaron and his company when researching Google Transit, right about the time this blog started. I’d meant to cover Trillium earlier, but I dropped the ball. Nonetheless, Aaron’s company is important because he helps smaller agencies get online with Google Transit, in particular, those small-to-midsized transit agencies that don’t have dedicated IT staffs. I’d like to see the numbers, but I have a suspicion that transit ridership numbers started ticking upwards in cities and towns where Google Transit started rolling out. I think it’s that good. It would be difficult to tell now, with gas prices changing so rapidly, but it seems like Trillium provides a great service. The Google Transit Google Group (message board) is filled with folks from various towns all over America asking for Google Transit in their town. At that point, Google can only say, “Please have your town create and publish a data feed that conforms to the GTFS specification, and we’ll make the rest happen.” So maybe Trillium can fill some of the in-between space there.

I’m going to post a few more notes on today’s sessions over at the San Francisco Bike Blog when I get a moment.

TechCrunch is the major blog covering all things Internet these days. It tends to focus on game-changing, technology-driven startups.

A few days ago they profiled RideTheCity.com, who we profiled a couple of months ago. Here’s what TechCrunch had to say:

RideTheCity is a cool mash-up application that allows you to plan bike routes based on safety and speed. By typing—or selecting—a start and end location in New York City, the application will find the safest and quickest routes by factoring in bike routes for “safest” trips and the shortest travel distance for the quickest trips.

The project is run by three bikers, Jordan Anderson, Vaidila Kungys, and Josh Steinbauer (Full disclosure: I went to college with Jordan but found out about this via NPR.) who connected Google maps to a few basic heuristic rules and added a cool logo. The GIS data comes from the city itself and is merged with Google Maps for display.

“Sometimes the most daunting thing about riding a bike in New York is figuring out the best route to take. How do you get to the bridge entrances? What’s the best way to Central Park from the Hudson River greenway? We created this website to help beginning bicyclists answer those questions,” said founder Jordan Anderson.

Just a small secondary link from that article to our site (http://googlemapsbikethere.org/) managed to bring us to a crawl. Let’s hope that the extra attention for RideTheCity.com helps bolster their efforts. And thanks to RideTheCity.com and TechCrunch.com for raising the profile of our collective efforts.

That’s not something I’ve thought too much about, but we know that BBBike does it, so presumably, if Google Maps were to provide a “Bike There” feature, they would want to provide a travel-time estimate, so they would need to be able to estimate the speed of the average bicycle commuter. Fortunately for us, Joel Fajans, a physics professor at UC-Berkeley, has done the research. He introduces his work with physics and bicycles this way:

Combining my work and hobby, I’ve spent some time investigating the physics of bicycling. Did you know that to turn a bike to the right, you actually push the handlebars to the left? And contrary to the beliefs of most physicists, the stability of a bicycle has little to do with the angular momentum in the wheels. I’ve written a nontechnical summary, and a technical tutorial paper on the bicycle steering. The calculations in the paper were done in MathCad, and can be downloaded.

A PDF version of the article is here.

We’re big on research, so it’s great to find another great source of good information.

Can’t say the “push the handlebars to the left” makes sense to me, but what do I know? I guess you push on the left side of your handlebars and pull on the right side.

From this page, we read that Melanie Curry is the managing editor of ACCESS, a transportation journal published quarterly by the University of California Transportation Center at Berkeley.

I stumbled onto the work of Fajans when doing some quick research for a post about stop sign laws.

A cycling professor, huh? Hmm. Remind you of anyone?

Reddit is a popular social news website. Today, we made their front page:

Now, we just need a bit more help to push it up to the top and keep it there for a bit. It could help us get lots of exposure, so please consider rolling over there, doing the quick sign-up (which does not require an email address, I don’t think), and voting up our petition. I’ve been an on-and-off-again user of Reddit, so I already had an account.

Thanks!

A brand new website called Ride the City, based out of New York City, is a very nice bicycle directions application. In fact, I’m pleasantly surprised at how nice it is.

That makes me very happy because I feel that, as bikers and walkers, we deserve the best. Every time we ride or walk somewhere, we’re helping to make the world a better place, and yet as of now doing so can still be very challenging in some places. That’s my take.

Ride the City’s clean, crisp, very pleasant and easy-to-use interface seems to suggest, “Cyclists and pedestrians deserve the best, so here you go.”  

Gothamist covers Ride the City here, and StreetsBlog covers them here.

Right now they only cover New York City, but our hope is that they will be able to expand coverage to all of our towns and countries, eventually.

The site does not actually do walking directions yet, but maybe we can convince them to work on that as soon as they’ve managed to make sure the bicycle directions functionality is top notch. Another petition! Kidding.

Ride the City uses Google Maps to show you your bike route, and it even uses the same simple one-line address entry-type system that Google Maps uses, so entering an address is super-quick and easy, and it’ll be familiar to all of us Google Maps users.

I tried some directions from a place I stayed in Manhattan, “350 W 18th St.” (see screenshot below), over to a place I stayed in Brooklyn, “5th and 1st, Brooklyn,” and it seemed to work. Already included is the ability to see bike shops along the way, to navigate by the most direct, safe, or safest routes, and the directions show which segments are bike lanes and which are greenways. Very cool stuff.

I’m very excited about Ride the City. It is pretty much exactly what we’ve been hoping for: a Google Maps-based bicycle directions application. It’s just awesome. As they continue to ramp up functionality and tighten up the service, it should be a huge boost for the City, and a huge positive for all of us who hope/expect to have this available in our towns in the future.

A website like Ride the City has direct benefits to lots of people, of course, but I particularly like the idea that it proves an application like this is possible, and it can be very useful to people. It seems like the possible is mostly taken care of; now, we just need to wait for reports from New Yorkers to find out if the useful part is true, too. I suspect it will be.

There are myriad features Ride the City can and probably will add over the coming months and years ( it already seems they’re busy improving and adding features), but this is a tremendous start. I’d highly recommend breezing through their very informative FAQ—it answered the first five questions that popped into my head.

Question #14 is very important because they basically told us how they did it, which is very cool of them:

14) What kind of technology did you use to build Ride the City?

Ride the City was built almost exclusively from open source software and tools. Here are a few technologies worth highlighting:

• • A Postgresql database with the PostGIS extension.
  • pgRouting components for route optimization: There would be no Ride the City without it!
  • OpenLayers mapping library for drawing markers, vector lines, and popups.
  • Google Maps API as a base map in OpenLayers. We also use Google’s geocoding service.
  • uDig Desktop GIS: uDig connects directly to our remote PostGIS database. A few quirks, but total genius overall. It was a lifesaver in terms of data cleanup since I could run it on my MacBook.

The whole shebang runs on a linux server hosted by Micro Resources. Special thanks to Gary Sherman for his expertise and support on getting all these things to work together.

The blog/faq are Drupal. All the custom development was done in PHP and javascript.

Of course, we’re still hoping that Google will eventually see the light and implement bicycling and walking directions in the main Google Maps interface, but this is a great great start. I think it’d be awesome if Google just went ahead and acquired Ride the City and BBBike so we can accelerate this whole “bicycling lifestyle” thing a little bit.  

Oh. One thing I forgot to mention was Ride the City’s very cool feedback form. If there is a particular road segment that you don’t like, just click it on the map, rate it, and add any comments. It supposedly ties right into their back-end data, which presumably means it can directly affect the routes that get provided. They already show little warning signs next to segments where people have reported potential dangers. I read about their feedback form on their initial blog post. I’ve never been crazy about the “wiki” style of bicycle routing—that is, routes would be recommended based on everybody rating particular routes or roads—but Ride the City seems like they may have actually found a manageable, intelligent way to do it. Time will tell, but this particular piece of technology alone, in my opinion, is extremely noteworthy. So, I’ll be anxious to see how it works out.

We’ll definitely be following Ride the City closely. And don’t forget to check out and subscribe to their blog in case you don’t want to wait for us to report on the latest goings on with Ride the City.

This is a great great development. Bravo to Ride the City, BBBike, and everyone else pushing to make this functionality available to bikers everywhere.

About three and a half months ago, we received an email from Markus Heller (English) of Berlin, Germany. He mentioned that there was a great bicycle directions tool available for Berlin, and that it was called BBBike (English language version here). We wrote back and said something like, “Thanks! We’ll be sure to check it out!”

Well, I’m not sure if I ever checked it out. It’s possible, but I don’t remember it.

So, apologies to you, Markus (and to the developer(s) of BBBike), and thanks!

[Markus seems to be pretty heavily involved in the carfree living movement, which is very cool. The one word that excites me as much as bicycle is car-free. Check out his website/organization, autofrei wohnen (in English), which I believe stands for car-free living. And don't forget the Towards Carfree Cities 2008 conference going on starting Monday, June 16, in Portland, Oregon, and lasts all week. And big score if they can manage to pull off the live webcast. This looks like it's going to be a great event.]

I just happened to be going back through my Gmail inbox and stumbled upon our initial conversation and I quickly realized that I’d overlooked a very important site. I noticed it this time because John Pucher mentioned the existence of such a site, if not by name, in his presentation. The initial notes I took while listening to the talk looked approximately like this:

• Bicycle route mapping (in Berlin, Germany)!!! This is the text from the relevant slide:
  • Free internet bike trip planning in Berlin:
  • Cyclists enter origin, intermediate stops and final destinations of their intended bike trips.
  • Cyclists can indicate preferences:
    - desired speed of travel
    - direct arterial streets or secondary roads
    - type of pavement
    - volume, speed and mix of traffic
    - on-street lanes, off-street paths, parkways

If I had realized what Markus had sent a few months ago, I would have been very excited. But, I’m just happy to know it’s out there and helping people, and helping to push the boundaries of what is possible for bicycle directions.

Here is a screenshot of the web version of BBBike:

I tried BBBike and it definitely seems cool; seems like it works pretty well. There is an online web version, and there is a downloadable version, too (screenshots). I only tried the online option. I just started picking random starting and end points and then looked at the routes produced. I can’t say for sure that it was picking the correct routes—either the safest or fastest or whatever—but I was very impressed that it seemed to route me on greenways, through parks, and so forth. It allows you download all the GPS information for your mobile device, and can produce a map as an image, as a Google Map, and more.

And, as far as I can tell, it’s completely open source, so you can download and modify it. I perused the source code (mostly in PERL), and it seems very clean and readable. There aren’t many comments in the code, but that might even be a good thing—me trying to decipher German would not be pretty. I can’t say the source code made a whole lot of sense to me, as I’m still a novice with all this GIS mapping technology stuff, but I definitely think it’s cool that it’s there to download and modify if we want, etc.

The also appears to be various sorts of extensions and plugins for BBBike—for CMS software like Mambo, for web browsers like Firefox, and more. In short, it seems like BBBike has been around for a while and is a solid, mature, sophisticated offering. I mean, it can deal with wind speed and tell you how many traffic lights you have to go through on your journey. How ridiculous is that? Brilliant stuff. It’s the least that cyclists (and pedestrians) deserve.

Contact information for the author of the code/project is below, in German (possibly with a Croatian address (?), but here is an English translation):

Autor: Slaven Rezic
E-Mail: slaven@rezic.de
Homepage: http://www.rezic.de/eserte/
Telefon: +49-172-1661969
Donji Crnač 81, BiH-88220 Široki Brijeg

So, thanks to you, Slaven!

There’s a link to the ADFC Berlin (English) – what seems like the “German/Dutch Bicycle Club.” (Don’t quote me on that translation.) I always think it’s great to see people in countries all around the world working on the same issues we’re working on.

Many of us have seen and used bicycle maps—those pretty PDF documents with bike lanes and whatnot drawn on them. (Here is the Austin Bike Map) They help us get from Point A to Point B in relative safety.

Well, now we can almost view them using Google Docs. I say almost because the new feature is still pretty limited— you can’t zoom in on the PDF yet, for instance, making it pretty much unusable as a potential online bike map viewer. And you also can’t share PDFs publicly yet; to share  you have to send Google Docs email invites out. But I suspect these things will (may?) change in the not-too-distant future.

This feature could make getting bicycle directions just a bit easier, because we could avoid having to download and install and figure out how to use Adobe Reader – the free-but-bloated PDF viewer that I suspect most folks are familiar with. (Adobe created the PDF file format)

Viewing a PDF can sometimes be a hassle. You may have to save a PDF to your hard drive before you can open it. You can get different “Download” vs. “View” behavior depending on which browser you’re using, or which computer you’re using. You can get annoying popups from Adobe telling you that you need updates, or that you’re missing some piece of their software, and so forth. In short, viewing PDFs can be a royal pain. I figure it’s possible that Google Docs’ new support for PDFs might help alleviate some of these issues. At a minimum, it could be one less piece of software we have to install on our computers to get the information we need.

So what does this mean for our efforts? Well, not necessarily a whole lot at the moment, but it does represent something: one more step that Google has taken to help “organize the world’s information,” and it could help us bikers in several ways.

By allowing PDFs to be easily viewed online, we’ve taken the extremely valuable data that is locked in PDF-based bike maps and made it easier for people to access. For our particular efforts, of course, we’re most concerned with having easy access to bicycle route information. We want bicycle navigation on Google Maps, but there are plenty of things that can make our lives easier in the interim. This might be one of them.

If you use a mobile device like a Blackberry or an iPhone, this should make it easier for you to pull up a bicycle map when you need it. It seems as though there are PDF viewers available for those devices already, but again, this could be one less piece of software that we have to worry about installing (It’s possible this feature is not available for Google Docs on mobile phones, yet.).

I feel like this small feature of Google Docs also helps to reinforce this very positive notion of making public data freely available, and making it easier for people to use. We’ve talked before about how much free GIS data there is available, at least in America, and how Google is now working with companies like ESRI to make that data easier to access, understand, and use. We’ve mentioned efforts to push governments to open up public data to….the public.

In summary, a seemingly-small step, but a worthy one, nonetheless.

VZ Navigator (wiki) is a GPS navigation software application you can download to your Verizon Wireless cellphone. In addition to the standard driving directions, the program provides bike and walk directions, though I’m not sure of their quality. One of the settings screens allows you to change your “Vehicle Type” from “Car / Motorcycle” to biking or walking.

The application has been around for at least a couple of years, but it is getting new attention these days with the better display capabilities of new phones, and the groundswell of interest in location-based services (LBS).

My roommates just bought bikes and decided to look into using VZ Navigator to get around unfamiliar areas. It does seem to work, in that it claims to provide “bike directions,” but the quality of those directions remains to be tested.

Google is still doing things in mobile maps. They have the cool “My Location” feature for mobile phones, like BlackBerries:

And the Google Mobile Blog just let us know that Google Maps for mobile devices now has Transit directions available—just like Google Maps in your browser.

Now, if we can just convince Google to push a bit more in the direction of bike and walk navigation…  

Knowing the safest bicycle route from Point A to Point B is a natural concern, but there are other uses for providing bicycle directions on Google Maps…like getting un-lost.

It happened to me just three or so weeks ago. I went “south of the river” to an area I was not familiar with. Of course, it was dark by the time I was coming back, and I lost my way. Not only did I not know where the bike lanes were, but I didn’t even know which general direction I was supposed to be heading. I rode around for an hour or so trying to figure it out, but I eventually caved and asked for directions. Then I got lost again. Then I asked for directions again, and finally made my way back home.

If I had a “personal navigation device”—a Garmin or similar device—I would at least have been able to head in the right direction, but ideally I would have been able to get bicycle directions from wherever I was to wherever I was going.

With the upcoming version of the iPhone, and the first Android phones on their way, we should have compass and GPS capabilities available to us. This is another reason Google Maps should provide a “Bike There” feature.

The Android Community blog is covering the Google I/O Developer Conference. Check out the video below of using Google Maps Street View with the built-in compass feature of an Android-powered phone:

Walt Mossberg, tech columnist for the New York Times, reminds us that it’s possible to get driving directions from google by using simple text messaging from your cellphone, so it’s not even necessary to have one of these newer, fancier cellphones to be able to take advantage of bicycle directions on Google Maps.

That’s the title of an article written by Paul Adam Smith. Paul is a co-founder and developer at EveryBlock—a very cool mashup-type application that might have implications for the reporting of street closures, potholes, crime reports, and other bicycle- and pedestrian-related issues. EveryBlock’s co-founder, Adrian Holovaty, presented at Where2.0, and during Adrian’s talk he mentioned this article by Paul; that’s how I found out about the article. I looked it up, and it’s really good.

The article, a very good introduction to internet-based map building, suggests that rolling your own maps—that is, not using Google Maps, Mapquest, or another big map player as your base toolset—is possible, and even possibly desirable:

We live in the era of Google Maps. What started off as an impressive refresh of Mapquest-style maps now fuels web mashups. With APIs official and unofficial, Google Maps is simple enough for front-end designers to embed and for back-end programmers to target. Along the way to becoming nearly ubiquitous, it has played a major role in the “democratization of mapping.” For the practical developer who wants to add geospatial information to a site or application, the Google Maps API has been an easy call.

But, perhaps no longer. As websites mature and the demand for geographic applications grow, the old mashup arrangement is starting to chafe. Mapping components are more and more vital, and so we demand greater control, expressiveness, and functionality from them.

Fortunately, as in many aspects of internet technology, an ecology of open-source online mapping tools has emerged alongside the market leader. It is now possible to replicate Google Maps’ functionality with open source software and produce high-quality mapping applications tailored to our design goals. The question becomes, then, how?

Hopefully we won’t have to build this for ourselves, as we want it available on the main Google Maps interface (that’s of primary importance, I would argue), but if we do have to do it ourselves, this article points us to a lot of useful information.

For starters, I had no idea that geodata was so difficult to get in some parts of the world, such as outside the United States. Here is the relevant part of Paul’s article:

Street beat

As I mentioned above, many mapping applications require a streets layer. Streets are a primary way that people orient themselves—the closest thing we have to a practical coordinate system in the world. As you might imagine, a database of streets is a large, complex, and valuable asset. Companies, such as NAVTEQ and TeleAtlas employ a fleet of vehicles to scour the world’s roads, arterials, and expressways, amassing the exact coordinates of each street they travel. You can purchase a license to use this type of commercial database for your own applications—usually at a per-page-view rate. It can be expensive, but if your organization can afford it, you’ll have the benefit of a constantly-updated, high-quality streets layer, with near-comprehensive coverage.

You may recognize Navteq (wiki) and Tele Atlas (wiki) from copyright signatures in the bottom-right corner of lots of Google Maps layouts, depending on the location being mapped. Navteq is being bought by Nokia (wiki), and that may help push pedestrian navigation into mobile phones a bit quicker. No word on bike navigation yet.

In addition to being able to license street data from commercial companies, folks interested in mapping American streets can use the Tiger/Line database for free. It’s not perfect, but it’s not too bad, either. European countries don’t have similar freely-available databases of street data collected by the respective governments. I would presume other Commonwealth countries like Canada and Australia and South Africa and India share similar government policies, but I don’t know.

PublicGeoData.org and OpenGeoData.org are websites/organizations aimed at open and/or free access to all public geodata. If you live in or are interested in Europe and mapping/navigation projects, you’ll probably want to be familiar with initiatives surrounding INSPIRE—The Proposed European Commission Directive on European Spatial Data Infrastucture. Check out INSPIRE’s website.

All of the discussion surrounding publicly-available geodata has helped me recognize the significance of projects like OpenStreetMaps.org—a site we’ve had listed on our Other Efforts page for a while.

Paul Adam Smith, the author of the article we’ve been talking about, is also a co-founder and board member of Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail, “a 501(c)3 non-profit grassroots organization advocating for the conversion of the unused Bloomingdale railroad in Chicago into a multiuse, elevated linear park.” Go check it out and get involved if you can.