Earlier this year, Google added bicycle paths and directions to Google Maps, a feature users had been requesting for some time. The feature launched in beta, with bike lane and trail information for 150 cities, but the Google Maps team knew even then that it was far from complete.
Now, Google is saying that the “effort to improve our bike maps has surpassed our happiest expectations”, with tens of thousands of suggestions from users across the country.
According to the post today on Google’s LatLong Blog, the response to Google Maps’ bicycling directions has been tremendous.
More than 10,000 people have submitted about 25,000 suggestions for improvements to our bike maps. With their help, we’ve added bike lane and trail data for an additional 80 cities since our initial launch. This is an exciting and humbling response from the Google Maps community. It’s like having 10,000 new members of our bike maps team, contributing their time and energy to make Google Maps more useful for everyone.
The blog goes on to give a number of examples, from users pointing out little bits of trails and bike-specific tunnels to entire trail systems to be added to the maps.
Last week we looked at a report by research firm Forrester that says that a majority of U.S. consumers are willing co-creators – that is, they are willing to assist in the creation of a product – and Google’s bicycle maps effort seems like a prime example of this.
For those of you (like me) who find yourself wishing you could get biking directions on your iPhone, the mobile website is a great alternative to the native iPhone app. If you’re out and about and see something that’s wrong, join in on the effort and use Google’s “Report a Problem” tool.
