Retiring the Bike Mapper Project
For the 1 ½ people out there who will notice or care: I’m officially retiring the East Bay Bike Mapper project. This is prompted largely by Google’s recent release of bicycling directions on Google Maps.
I’ve tried Google’s bike directions, and they’re pretty darn good. There is not much chance I could reach a hundredth as many people, even if somehow my directions were marginally better. I’ve been using “Report a Problem” like a fiend, and I just hope that someone in Mountain View (or Bangalore?) will get to my suggestions sometime this year.
I have submitted lots of corrections for my area. Based on my experience, Google makes fixes that have to do with automobile routes quickly, usually within a week. They don’t seem to be in as much of a hurry when it comes to bike and pedestrian routes. I submitted information about some pedestrian walkways and stairways in the Oakland hill. Not many people know about these, but they’re documented in the printed “Walk Oakland!” map, and most of them are visible on aerial photographs. Google did add them eventually, but it took them about a month.
They’ve got lots of fixes to make:
- Did you know you can ride across the Bay on the same route the ferry takes?
- Care to ride your bike up and down some stairs in the Berkeley hills?
- No one wants you biking through the Bonsai Garden at Lake Merritt (besides, the gate is usually locked).
Don’t expect the “beta” notice to go away anytime soon. Walking directions have been in beta for what, three or four years now?
It’s been fun learning about python, javascript, etc., but I think I need to devote more energy to my real passion (and vocation) as a hydrologist and water policy analyst.
My favorite feature of the bike mapper was a snippet of code that produced the following text based on your route:
By riding your bike for this 1.9-mile trip, you’ll burn 95 calories, save $0.53 on gas, and prevent the emission of 3 lbs of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gases.
I’ll go ahead and publish that in case anyone out there wants to use it. The latest Google Maps API v3 includes the Bicycle Directions features, so it would be easy enough to make a mashup that lets Google compute the directions and then gives you this info. Perhaps one could set up a site where cyclists are an eligible recipient in the voluntary carbon offset market? Hmm… there’s a thought. Get paid to ride your bike. 