Spring finally arrived in Vienna, sun is shining and I could reactivate my bicycle. Since I go quite often by bike during summer months I decided to start a kind of a “bike project” this year. My bike will serve for another purpose too than just bringing me from point A to B, it’ll track and share the way in-between.
Recent discussions about INSPIRE and free geodata directed my attention to the OpenStreetMap initiative. In my opinion it’s a great idea and I decided to participate. But first a few GPS street tracks for sharing are needed. So I equipped my bike with a Garmin GPSmap 60C. Well, to be honest, it’s rather carrying the device with me than owning a GPS enabled bicycle now. Btw, can somebody recommend a clamp or another good method to mount the Garmin GPSmap 60C on a bike?
The plan is to track every meter I’m going by bicycle during this summer. It allows me to add some more street information of Vienna to OpenStreetMap and I get an interesting picture of how often and which bike routes and streets I’ve chosen. This may sound pretty geeky, actually it is, but I kind of enjoy toying around with geo technology.
The continuously growing picture of my bike trails you can observe online, in my so called bike_trails map.
If you’re interested, this script let me easily display my GPX formated GPS tracks as overlay in a customized Google Map (mashup, to name a buzzword and make some search robots happy). As you can see, the GPS tracks don’t exactly match the Google Map behind. I’m not quite sure which one of both is more inaccurate, Google or GPS…