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!
If I had to think of a solution to start creating a bicycle routing system, I’d do exactly what The San Francisco County Transportation Authority has done: create smart phone apps, gather information where cyclists are riding, data mine those tracks and build route suggestions on top of that knowledge.
Bicycle routing is in my opinion far more complex than car routing. Car routing is mostly based on well known and documented rules, also known as road traffic regulations. Mix in estimated traffic figures, average speeds and fuel consumptions and you get pretty decent car directions.
For cyclists, a similar rule set exists, but it’s maybe a little more, let’s call it, elastic. Cyclists use short-cuts, turn where cars can’t, go against traffic, ride through parks and on poorly documented trails. High traffic doesn’t mean slowdown for cyclists. They ride by on the bike lane on the right side of a traffic jam at almost the same speed as without traffic. But high traffic creates a security risk some cyclists aren’t comfortable with taking and rather choose a different route.
A perfect route from A to B for speedy messengers doesn’t necessarily mean it’s also an ideal route for kids. For your daily commute you probably pick another route than for weekend rides, even though it connects the same points.
Bicycle routing criteria is manifold, sometimes psychological, hard to measure and to quantify. Researching how cyclists are going, for what purpose and under what conditions, is a very smart way to get started on that topic.
This is going to be a list-post, a must-have item on blogs as I read recently.
Last week I attended Richard Weait’s OpenStreetMap presentation at the Boston LUG. He gave a good overview on what OSM is about, why it’s so fascinating and showed how to participate. Even though I’m a bit familiar with OSM for some time now, I learned a couple of new things about OpenStreetMap:
- North America is only covered superficial. It looks good on a small scale, large areas appear mapped in OSM, but as you zoom in and look at it more closely you’ll find many problems. I’m not sure if motivation would be higher if people start mapping from scratch and “create” their own maps of their places instead of working on existing data and fix errors. On the other hand, the AND data donation of Indian and Chinese road data (mostly of poor quality) helped to create awareness and interest in mapping those countries, as some people mentioned during the discussion.
- Germany has the largest OSM community. Not surprising that this country is among the first ones where OSM is integrated into business models (e.g. Geofabrik, WhereGroup or GDV).
- Open Database License: the idea of Creative Commons transferred to suit database licensing.
- “Edit wars” taking place in Cyprus about the default place names, shell scripts vs. manual edits.
- OpenPisteMap: an OSM side project for ski slopes which adds hill shading and contour lines to OSM. One might think that it’s Austria’s #1 mapping project. Well, I’m afraid that’s not the case. Apparently not many fellow citizens have ever heard of it because we look like a desert in terms of available ski slopes at OpenPisteMap. Shame on us!
- If you discover OSM flaws and can’t fix them directly on the map, then just go to and add a note in OpenStreetBugs.
- Another interesting OpenStreetMap routing service I didn’t know before. It even considers elevation profiles for cyclists or pedestrians where available.
The parts of Cambridge I know so far are mapped fine (was a MassGIS data donation). The only thing I’m doing here in OSM is adding bike lanes to existing streets in my neighborhood. Since I really enjoy exploring this place by bike, that’s probably the most useful map layer to me.
I can probably list more than a hundred studies, reports or articles dealing with the negative impact of cars on modern city structures. But none of them illustrates the benefit of car-free cities so well as the image below does:
City of Münster showing the amount of space occupied if the same group of people would go by car, bus or bike.
Which street would you prefer for living: the one packed with cars or the one where kids could play on?
I never owned a car and don’t plan to do so. My mobility is based on bike, public transport and car sharing and I can’t complain about a low standard of living. [via Helge]
…are the natural enemies of urban cyclists.
It’s daily proven fact!
What a mess after the storm. Just arrived at home and I really had to watch out riding my bike to not run into parts of trees lying all over the streets.
Even worse is that the storm literally destroyed – yes, chairs took off and were thrown into the water! – our nice little company event at the Adria, including the outdoor barbecue.
Kudos to the Adria team who managed the messy situation quite well and made a pleasant evening possible, including indoor barbecue.
The first freezing day means the end of biking season.
Today ends the pleasure of greeting Fiaker horses in the morning on the way to work, no more fun with arrogant Audi drivers on the road, and finally, the luxury of door-to-door travel time less than 25 minutes within the inner city districts is gone too.
So, hello crowded subway, hello angry looking morning people and hello cold winter waiting time, we’re going to spend the next few months together.
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…
The city of Vienna offers a well-built bicycle infrastructure. In September 2005 the 1000th bicycle-track-kilometer was finished. If weather is fine it’s the fastest way to move within the inner districts (1.-9.) of Vienna. I think its share in the viennese modal-split must be around 4-5% now. According to the Transportation Master Plan it should increase up to 8% by 2020. On certain streets you’ll be able to count about 5.000-8.000 cyclists on a rainless day.
Since spring should be arriving within the next few weeks I thought that I’ll have a look if there are some new useful bicycle tracks available. Browsing through the city’s website I came across this service: Routing for cyclists.
As in any other routing service you enter a start/end location and the system calculates the best (shortest/fastest/cheapest) route for you. Like car routing systems consider parameters such as speed limits, fuel consumption, traffic volume, etc. this bicycle routing includes one-ways (in many one-ways cyclists are allowed to drive in both directions), slopes, bicycle tracks and low-traffic-volume roads in its calculation. Sounds pretty exciting for everyone who likes to go by bike in Vienna.
Just to do a short test I entered my home and work address and let the system calculate the best route. The result was surprising because I wouldn’t even had thought of choosing that way to my office. But the route makes sense, maybe it’s better than I’m thinking. When weather allows it I’ll give it a try.
I’m aware that only car navigation and routing is interesting for doing businesses in that market. The business of city governments is basically, among others, to attract residents. One of the “products” a city has to offer is quality of life. In terms of improving quality of urban life and urban transportation systems, increasing non-motorised modal split shares, services like the mentioned bicycle routing can be a valuable contribution.
Of course building more and better bicycle-oriented navigation and routing systems would be nice task for GIS experts too.