Ride Your Bike

A worthy petition crossed my desk:

We would like a 'Bike There' feature added to Google Maps - to go with the current 'Drive There' and 'Take Public Transit' options.
The feature would take into account actual bicycle lanes from the locality being mapped, and it would automatically plan a route for a bicyclist, possibly even providing the cyclist options for either the most direct route, or the most bicycle-friendly (safest) route. The Google Maps-based third party site, byCycle.org (http://byCycle.org/), provides these features for two metro areas - Portland, Oregon and Madison, Wisconsin, and there are countless other mapping initiatives around the world aimed at accomplishing the same goal. We hope that Google will consider building this feature into the core Google Maps service.

You do not have to be Peter Hoffman riding around town on his lowrider bicycle like some latter-day green Ben Franklin to see the utility here, but it  does raise a few  questions. The "safest" option  implies less  safe options, which suggests that there are routes, which while legal, are not safe. In real life, this is true, but institutionalizing the notion that it is incumbent upon cyclists to find routes where they are not, you know, interfering with real traffic, rather than for motorists to recognize that bikes exist. It is a different iteration of the problem I have with bike lanes, in that while they are universally ignored by motorists, they undermine the right of cyclists to ride on roads where there are not bike lanes.
Cyclists can disagree on the question of bike lanes, but not on the Flavor Channel:
The Flavor Channel_"Ride_Your_Bike" Plexicom, 1998

Comments

[Jared]

This is true (both the bicycle safety thing and the Flavor Channel thing) but I'm not actually sure why this Google Maps feature would be that useful. If you're going to bike somewhere, it's close enough to home that you have a pretty good idea how to get there anyway. The real first step would be for Google to add bike trails to their maps.