Google maps goes bike-tacular, just in time for spring

"Bicycle" is now an option for mode of transport in Google maps. Ostensibly, the directions given will help you avoid particularly nasty car traffic and particularly disheartening elevation changes, though Treehugger found some kinks in that when they tried to plot a route across San Francisco. There's not enough uphill slogs in Minneapolis (and I don't know St. Paul well enough) to get you a real solid second opinion from the Twin Cities. But it was smart enough to not send theoretical me biking straight up the feels-like-45-degree incline of 14th street when asked for directions to the University of Kansas journalism school (see above).

It also shows dedicated bike trails and bike lanes, to help plan the trip.

How's this work for your hometown?

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

Maggie goes places and talks to people. Find out where she'll be speaking next.

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Alex

Works only so-so in Santa Clarita. It has most of the major bike paths, but none of the minor ones, so really can’t give a useful route to most places.
Anonymous

loving it for portland! I just checked the route from my house to work and it was the exact route I take.
mad ivan

Just checked it out for Toledo, Ohio (USA). I bike commute to the local university; I have a favorite (although indirect) route from my neighborhood that avoids all major surface streets by using the bike trails through the city park/golf course. It’s about a half-mile longer than the “straight down the suicidally busy, debris-laden, potholed-to-the-center-of-the-earth main street” route. Google gave me the bad but shorter route first, and a very plausible variant of my route second. (Bonus – it also showed a third route that I may explore just for variety later this spring.)
jonathan_v

Ride the city is pretty neat : people can write-in safety info.

For example , they used to give an official bike lane as the safe route – except it was a super-dangerous, congested street that just-happened-to-have a bike lane.. and has constant accidents. A block away is a one-way street that is rarely used. After an email , they checked it out and altered their routing instructions.
Kid Geezer

We’ve had this in Seattle for quite awhile, now. I haven’t actually tried it as I am so well set in my biking routes and I like hills. Great feature, though.
- bpratt
  
  Maybe they’ll add an option to choose maximum grade, and we can use it to find good training rides in unfamiliar cities. I suppose I should be posting ideas like that at google, not BB…
LILemming

Just compared my morning commute in Ridethcity vs. Google.

Honestly I like Google’s route better. RideTheCity wants to keep taking me over to the Hudson River pathway, or if I chosoe “direct” it ignores all the bike routes. Google gives me two choices, one is fairly similar to a route I take and the other is the Hudson River pathway.

As an aside, on a nice spring or summer day there’s NOTHING safe about trying to commute on the Hudson River bikepath.
Anonymous

It didn’t do very well for me. I’ve been refining my route for several years – a half-rural, half-urban trip into a nearby smallish city. My own route is over a mile shorter than Google’s, and Google sent me down two separate narrow-laned, super-busy streets (at commuting times of the day). My own route emphasizes wide lanes and one-way streets where possible, and picks up a bike trail for the last mile or so.
Anonymous

This is pretty interesting for my hometown of Newark, DE. Going from class to my apartment it sends me through two difficult to avoid parking gates, through a fenced off area under construction, and darting through the most heavily trafficked street in the city.
Forgiving the construction, it’s not terrible if you don’t mind hopping off your bike a few times to ensure you don’t kill yourself.
My daily route is better though!
dragonfrog

“We could not calculate directions between (your house), Edmonton, AB, Canada and (one block straight up the street from your house), Edmonton, AB, Canada”

So, got a little ways to go yet. Even if they improved their walking routes that would be a big help – I have no trouble dividing the time estimates according to how much faster I am one a bike.

Edmonton has 3 pedestrian/cycling bridges over the river which just don’t show up on google’s walking routes, and a number of trails that can often cut down on distances by letting you follow diagonals through city blocks rather than zigzagging.
ToddBradley

I tried it for a couple sample routes in my hometown of Broomfield, Colorado. That’s a suburb of Denver. For one trip (my house to Home Depot) it had me wind around through all these little residential streets instead of taking the faster and larger arteries. I sure wouldn’t have taken that route.

It also made me wonder how they’re estimating speed. For instance, the map from my house to the kung fu dojo in the next town said I should be able to bike it in 31 minutes. But it takes 15 minutes by car, with most of that being on a 55 mph highway. There’s no way I personally could bike it in 31 minutes, especially loaded down with my normal Sunday errands kit (backpack, notebook, AC adapter, water, extra clothes, food, etc.) Maybe a hard core cyclist could do it in 31 minutes on a road bike, but on my commuter hybrid bike it would take an hour, I think.
satchellmr

I tried to map a route from Bloomington to St. Paul and it put me through the Fort Snelling National Cemetery! I’m guessing the caretakers won’t encourage this?
Crispinus211

Not bad for my ride into Saratoga Springs — at least it’s on the map — but the recommended road is insanely hilly and a little dangerous (small shoulders to ride on, blind turns, hillbillies). I was prompted to enter comments, and I did. I wonder what the outcome will be.
Hybridan

Wow, thanks for the post. This feature worked really well for the mid-sized mid-west University Town that I bike around. It picked out the same route that I have used for more then a year to get to work from my place after trying every direction that I could. It had some kinks for a few of the other routes that I take all the time, but was generally very good.

This is just another reason why I am willing to compromise so much of my personal information for Google, but not on in many other places. This feature, as a few others which they offer, directly save me time/money, and that to me is worth sacrificing some of my personal privacy.
Anonymous

What a wimp! When I went to KU I’d ride straight up the 14th street hill.
- http://maggiekb.com/ Maggie Koerth-Baker
  
  I bow to your moral superiority. :)
  
  Vaguely on-topic, isn’t it great to be able to say you walked to school uphill, both ways, in the snow, and be serious?
- Anonymous
  
  The first time I biked up 14th, my legs turned to wet spaghetti noodles and I might have actually heard that choir of angels on top of Fraser. Ten years after graduating, my calves are still rock hard (the only part of me, I might add). Thank you, KU.
MrsBug

Hmmm, interesting. I did both routes I could (possibly) use: from my house to work and then from my mom’s house to work. From my house, they made a beeline for our local RiverTrail and then east. From my mom’s house, they basically took the route I take.

I drive part way in, then ride the rest. I’m not hard-core enough to bike 12 miles one way nor do I want to get up early enough to get to work on time if I bike. I’m a slow-poke. PeeWee doodling along on his bike?…yeah, that’d be me.
Anonymous

It does a pretty bad job in Boston. At one point it sent me along a divided 60mph highway with no shoulder. Fortunately the error reporting system is well-integrated.
Anonymous

A group of the University of British Columbia put together this for Vancouver a few years ago:

http://cyclevancouver.ubc.ca

Works great … even has the latest Olympic road closures (as they apply to bikes)
Crispy Critter

It works for me now… but it misses a trail connection that I use routinely. Still, it’s a good start. The main problem is that the suitability of any potential bike route can be quite subjective.
Jesse in Japan

The hard part isn’t riding up 14th street, it’s riding down 14th street. I was a really dumb kid to try that.
Crispy Critter

It isn’t working at all for me. The drop-down list doesn’t say anything at all about bike routes. Yes, I cleared my cache. Maybe I’m hitting a different data center?
- Anonymous
  
  #23 Crispy, It doesnt work for me either. Post if you figure out why!
Anonymous

Lawrence, Kansas is my hometown and when I was going to KU I rode 14th street twice a day. Is there a wimpiness setting on Google Maps?
Roast Beef

Not totally bad, but not totally good. It mimicked my most obvious commute, but then on the back-commute had me going the wrong way around Prospect Park. I let ‘em know.

LILemming and anyone else interested in harm reduction on the Hudson River bike path: try singing! I’m serious. Sing as loud as you can. Tourists will be frightened of you and get out of your way.
- LILemming
  
  > try singing
  
  Granted, my singing will scare paint off the pavement. ;)
  
  That said I don’t think tourists are the biggest problem, they seem to stay on the (somewhat more scenic) pedestrian path. I will concede that tourists are pretty lethal on the Brooklyn Bridge path.
  
  My personal threat assessment for the Hudson Path on a nice day are below. Note that little kids just ignore the singing. Biddy packs tend to react violently to any audio stimulous:
  
  1) Biddy packs*
  2) Little kids who just got their training wheels off**
  3) Bladers***
  4) Rude joggers****
  5) Groups of people waiting for the light across the highway to change
  6) lost pedestrians (includes tourists)
  7) Polite joggers
  8) That guy who when he hears you say “passing on the left” moves _left_. 8)
  
  * A biddy pack is typically a group of four people abrest thus blocking one side of traffic entirely and the other direction at least partially.
  ** Teaching a kid to ride a bike on the Hudson River pathway is like teaching someone to drive by entering them into a NASCAR race.
  *** Bladers belong in the bike path. Most are very situationally aware, but an accelerating blader takes alot of the pathway.
  **** Joggers technically belong in the pedestrian pathway, but that can work poorly for the jogger. Politer joggers will run single file to the right. Rude joggers are kind of a high-speed biddy pack.
Friendlybunny

It got my route to work perfectly on the first try (in Austin TX).
heavyboots

I dunno though. I requested a home-to-work route and it sent me winging off through some crazy back street route. Which is fine except that there are major and minor roads with bike lanes available right beside those same back streets…

Basically not the route I would have chosen at all! I do like the map of all available bike routes though.
johnofjack

Does rather poorly for Gainesville FL–going from my place to Shands @ UF it sends me across 13th St. (which has a lot of traffic) away from Shands, only to cross 13th again later back towards Shands, and to go down Archer Rd and approach Shands from Archer. By far a better route on bike would be to turn right off 13th onto UF campus at Union Dr, then left at Buckman, then around the corner and left onto Gale Lemerand. That’s ignoring unmapped sidewalks).

From my place to my workplace it sends me across 13th at the city’s slowest-changing traffic signal, then across 6th ave. at the city’s second- or third-slowest traffic signal, then through the Duck Pond area and across 8th Ave (another street with heavy traffic) at a place with limited visibility and no traffic signal to give a designated time to cross.
Anonymous

Anyone in Europe will be unable to find their way via Google, as it says unable to calculate directions for even a very short ride. Hopefully it will be running soon.
Naganalf

Just tried out my Los Angeles commute. It nailed the route exactly. Impressive!
The Life Of Bryan

I started off be feeding it a trick question: a destination along a street no sane cyclist would ever ride, in an area nearly impossible to get to by other means. It failed that test by routing me up that street for many miles rather than going by other roads and using that one only at the end of the journey.

But even in more reasonable tests it doesnâ€™t do very well for this not-terribly-bike-friendly town. My work commute matched up pretty well, but with one of the local beaches as a destination it routed me down a very undesirable divided four lane, rather than the curvy coastal road that is the mecca of the local cycling scene.

So while I still maintain that Google Maps is the single most important tool an aspiring bike commuter has at their disposal, this particular feature doesnâ€™t really help much. Well, at least not yet.
sisyphus321

I tried it on my 20 mile commute through the Chicago suburbs. It didn’t do too bad, but Rohlwing road? Rand road? Yikes.
hal14450

While I think that Google adding this feature is handy I’m still a big proponent of the Open Street Map Project. The project uses the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 license. Anyone is free to download, edit, improve, and resell your own mashups of maps if so inclined. Here’s a link of interest to the cycling community:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Cycle_routes
Jupiter12

Maggie, I started reading the paragraph and thought “I wonder how it works for my town of Lawrence.” Then I quickly realized that you and I must live in the same neighborhood. I occasionally go running up 13th and 14th, but haven’t managed to do it on a bike. I get 3/4 way up, pedal like crazy but hardly move forward because I’m in the lowest gear, then finally walk it up the rest of the way. I’ll keep trying until I succeed.
- Maggie Koerth-Baker
  
  I hear the first time you pull it off, a choir of angels sings to you from the top of Fraser.
  
  I used to live in Lawrence (part-time as a young ‘un, and again in college). I’m in Minneapolis now. But I did once live in a certain hippie housing cooperative at the bottom of 14th street.
  - Anonymous
    
    Sunflower House!
    
    Now I miss Lawrence.
Buffal0gal

I was so excited about this… until I saw the map of the KU campus. *gag* EMAW!
Anonymous

hah it was going pretty well til it dumped me out on state street for 10 miles! that is absurd (state street in salt lake city is a 6/8 lane nightmare)
JeffF

It gave a very suicidal route from my apartment in Noe Valley San Fransico to UCSF mission bay (near the baseball stadium).

Ceaser Chavez + cyclist = corpse + wrecked bicycle.

Still it often seems like bike lanes are built on a similar principle: “hey this three lane 40mph street with two freeway interchanges is kinda flat and has an extra two feet on the curb side…”.
- JeffF
  
  It’s fun to give it really long routes to find. I’m thinking there is probably a bike route from Seattle to San Francisco that doesn’t cross the mountains twice!
- davedorr9
  
  “Cesar Chavez + cyclist = corpse + wrecked bicycle”
  
  slight calculation error
  
  Cesar Chavez + cyclist = (very sad, deceased labor leader) + (corpse + wrecked bicycle)
  
  It works sort of reasonably well for portland, or. Knowing these routes spectacularly well from running them, I’d say it did the best it could.
Juan_C_C

It gave me a route that was the shortest, but it sent me down a very busy road I would not like to ride on. (Champaign, IL)
Anonymous

very cool. although it gave me a 2 hour commute to work instead of my normal 20 minutes. i take my bike onto a ferry, and it missed that. although the beta version does have a handy place to let them know about that. very cool like i said.
kthugha

For St. Paul, it knows to avoid the hill on Summit Ave west of 35E. So as far as avoiding tough climbs, it passes an obvious test. We just lost all of our snow this past week, though, so I can’t test whether it thinks you’re crazy for attempting to bicycle through snow drifts or -20F temperatures…
firstbakingbook

huh. I thought routing around the hills was a bug, not a feature. :-p
gandalf23

hmmm..it sent me straight up I35. I think it does not work so good for Fort Worth :) On the plus side, it highlighted in green the local bike paths, and I found a new one I did not know about.
MadRat

I’m also trying it out for Portland and it doesn’t give the paths I would choose but I notice it gives several different options and you can hover your mouse over each one to see which fits best. The map’s ability to detect hills could be better and I wasn’t able to figure out how to click an address and have it enter that as the end point. But over all it’s useful and gives some idea of how to get somewhere on foot, bike or public transportation.
ogvor

I like how I’m seeing a reference to either Lawrence or Topeka (where I’m living and attending school currently and where I grew up, respectively) practically every day now on Boing Boing.

Rock Chalk!
apoxia

Well, it doesn’t work for New Zealand, btw it’s not spring here. Also, if you only bike during spring and summer you’re a total wuss (unless you live in one of those freaky places where snow accumulates on the road).
Anonymous

some routes, like Cesar Chavez in SF, are terrible for biking, but they are also official bike routes as per the City, so i need to blame that on the City, not Google.
Thac0

This is awesome, now i just need to save up enough to buy a bike!
Anonymous

Wow, Google’s bike directions for the East Bay are really bad, and in some cases quite dangerous. Did they not even contact the cities in question or the local bike coalitions for suggested route maps, as there are quite a few established routes that are not shown? I’m all for a bike directions feature, but it seems as though they should not have released it until it was ready to actually be used by real people. I hope nobody gets hurt or is discouraged from biking after following their instructions.
Anonymous

Doesn’t work for Vancouver, BC, home of the Winter Olympics. Which is fine, we have other options here.
Anonymous

Bike alternative not available where I live.
bpratt

Just about to leave for work (on my bike) so I punched in my endpoints to see what our Google Overlords would have me do. It’s pretty nearly my route, which is all city streets as opposed to bike paths. I’d quibble with a couple of choices, but a lot of that is about how confident one is riding in traffic. Considering the amount of local knowledge needed, it’s a pretty impressive first effort. As it happens, though, the google team that put this together is right here in Seattle so it’s maybe not a fair test.
- Ed Smith
  
  I’m pretty sure the Google team is nowhere near my town of Fresno, CA. And I have the same experience… not bad. Not bad at all. Just what I would recommend to a wobbly new rider wanting to ride from my house to my work.
Anonymous

not yet for the UK
Hambone

Does anyone know where Google is getting its information for this?
In the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul), MN, Cyclopath is the way to go for bike routes, in my opinion.
http://cyclopath.org/
Pantograph

I’m guessing that it’s US only for now, but I can walk from Amsterdam to Berlin in 5 days and 12 hours (presumably not counting rest). They still can’t tell me how to walk to Moscow though.
jonathan_v

http://RideTheCity.com

they’re been doing it longer, and their directions are safer.
- Maggie Koerth-Baker
  
  Quite nice, but much more limited on cities.
- bpratt
  
  Hadn’t seen that site before, thanks! Tried my endpoints there too, and I think Google did a better job. But again, bike routes are largely a matter of opinion when riding the streets. One thing BikeTheCity does do is offer 3 levels of “safety” (“safer” = all bike paths,”direct”=streets, “safe” = a mix). In my experience, though, bike paths are *less* safe due to the number of yahoos who think they don’t have to pay attention on the bike path, people walking dogs on long leashes, etc. Again, opinion.
  The Google route is similar to the BikeTheCity “direct” route, but actually somewhat shorter and less trafficky (they knew to send me through the car-free Seattle Center grounds).
  Ultimately Google will be able to crowdsource improvements in a way that nobody else can, and BikeTheCity will get paved (pardon the pun).
rebdav

Brilliant, maybe allow voting to improve routes.
PogoPoutine

Not available yet for Montreal.
- Anonymous
  
  That’s what I discovered, too. Anyone have any insight on whether it’s crowd-sourceable? Might open it up for other cities, faster.
Symbiote

CycleStreets is an excellent route-mapper for UK users, using Open Street Map data.

Where the OSM data is complete (which isn’t everywhere, yet) it usually includes all the extra essential bits — like a 5m long cut-through for pedestrians and cyclists, which might link together two minor roads and allow the cyclist to avoid the main road completely.
PBryden

Great two-wheeled news. You can pick the bicycling option for my city (Calgary, Canada), but it does not give a map yet, only an error message. I suspect that once the snow is clear it should be up and running!
Hugh

Has anyone ever got this to work in Vancouver? The option for bike routes is there, but I *always* get this error, no matter how short and straightforward the route should be:

“We could not calculate directions between…” X and Y.