It’s all over the (map/bike) news: Google added the long anticipated Bicycling layer to Google Maps, which shows bicycle facilities and enables bicycle directions. Excellent!
It’s a great move for bicycle advocacy and helps increasing awareness about cycling as serious urban transportation mode. According to that blog post on the Google Lat Long Blog, the Google Maps engineers developed some solid bicycle routing algorithms. The data is apparently coming from Rails-to-Trails, public sources and Google’s Street View and Imagery. In the areas I viewed, all data was (c) Google, which is, after we saw the parcel layer (c) by Google, not surprising at all.
Nice side effect: bicycling is available in Google Maps API V3 (which recently made it into OpenLayers).
Even though the bicycle layer looks pretty impressive at a first glance – lot’s of green lines in the Boston area – it’s clearly in beta stage. For my daily commute it suggested three basically realistic alternatives, only with 1 to 3 blocks detours from the route I usually take. My usual route includes going up a quiet one-way street which Google doesn’t suggest, instead it would send me to the car packed 4-lane highway.
Playing around with the marker, the routes get a little funkier:
- It’s not the shortest/quickest route. Bike trails are clearly weighted very high in the algorithm.
- You’re allowed to ride through the Boston Common, but not through the Public Garden as the algorithm suggests; missing restriction.
- The shown bike facilities in Cambridge are pretty messy and Boston looks way better than it actually is – Mass Ave preferred for bicycling? That’s one of the craziest streets you could possibly ride on.
- At Kendall the algorithm clearly gets confused with some turn restrictions and would send you up and down the street.
Despite those few glitches, Google has done an amazing job in introducing bicycle transportation to Google Maps – very exciting!
For the first time in my life I got pulled over on my bike. It was three of us running a red light this morning in Cambridge (Hampshire / Windsor btw). To be clear: there were absolutely no cars in the street we were crossing. No suicidal attempts or speeding blindly into a busy crossing. Just a totally empty street and a cop hiding between parked cars on the other side.
At least it was a cop on a bike, so we were all somewhat equal. The first cyclist tried to fight it, claiming the light was green. “Here is a $20 fine that you can fight”, said the cop, who apparently was not in arguing mood at all that morning. I and the cute blond girl switched to “Yes Sir, sorry Sir” mode and got away with a warning. Or maybe it was just the cute blond girl effect.
My favorite: “Car Alarm Over 10 Minutes” for $300 – nervous car security systems can be expensive in The People’s Republic of Cambridge!
I had a fantastic time yesterday at Gov 2.0 Camp New England and enjoyed the event a lot. In particular I was very impressed by the interest of the public sector. I wouldn’t say it’s typical that an event, held on a Saturday, which happens to be the first nice spring day in Boston, attracts so many government employees, ranging from the governor’s office to local town administrations, and affiliated organizations. Throughout the event you could feel the commitment to work on better and more inclusive governance at all levels.
My personal highlight was the first session I attended, about Open 311. It’s clearly not my core area, but I’m interested in the current development and felt that I learned a lot in that session. One of the most interesting points during the discussion was the evaluation of “Resistat”. Resistat is an initiative to include residents in 311 statistics in Somerville. It works very simple: a mailing-list facilitates communication and statistics and results are sent out to residents as powerpoint files. Not rocket science, but it’s enough communication technology that even though only about 25% of involved residents have been to in-person meetings, 85% of them say that they feel better engaged with their local government (by sending powerpoints to a mailing list, it’s as simple as that!). Anyway, great insights when talking about the “town hall meeting divide”, can’t wait to read the entire study about the program.
Our session about Open Data Strategies was “merged” together with I think 5 other sessions that had the word “data” in the title. Unfortunately it didn’t really work out as we intended it and the discussion went somehow all over the place. Better luck next time I guess.
The last session I picked was all about data visualization. Two young IBM researchers showed and demoed amazing data visualization tools – Many Eyes and sense.us among them. Their latest project, called “IBM Visual Bill explorer”, should make it easy for citizens to visually explore and analyze legal texts. Tremendously valuable when trying to understand or to find potential pitfalls in 1000+ pages documents written by lawyers, as bills usually are.
On a side note: I had absolutely no idea that IBM is running such a great research department. Where are marketing departments when you really need them?
Happy hour – free beer was involved – went straight to talking GIS and Open Source. As it turned out, there are very similar problems across gov agencies (surprising, huh!). One notion during the discussion was, that, instead of throwing money individually at our problems, why not join forces and contribute to and customize Open Source projects where we all benefit from? Interesting thought, will be continued…