BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

cool

If anyone has ideas of what to add to the map, I think that would make a good disscussion.

I have nothing specific to add, but it's a hard balance between getting the details people want and ahving a map too cluttered to use.

There are some types of viewing software that can help, but they run into a simliar dilema between features and ease of use.

If you use the 'My Maps' feature in Google Maps then you already have the basis for this functionality. I can make my own maps and add others. For example, by virtue of having clicked on dbacklover's map it now appears in 'My Maps' under 'Created by others'.

I can superimpose different maps or widgets by clicking on these in 'My Maps'. I can control which of these appear (or not) by using the check boxes at the bottom of the panel. This is really handy for lots of things, like showing contour lines.

Anyway, one solution to the clutter problem is to develop a set of maps, each dedicated to some feature (drinking fountains!) or other useful category.

@Ahlir

That is just what I was hoping could be done. looks like I will be playing around with it and seeing what can be done. It would be good to be able to layer the items you are interested in

say bike trails, water fountains, and outdoor art to layout out a ride. without having to worry about bike racks or bike shops.

add public bathrooms!

^^^THIS

Also this might require too much dynamism in the map, but how about freshly paved roads. In this city it's worth going a couple blocks out of one's way to take a smooth ride. (on that note, anyone going through Highland Park between Negley and Highland should ride Wellesley - paved about 1.5 months ago! Lovely)

Of course give it a winter and then updates are necessary...

I am playing around with the maps right now and I will be splitting them up, I am putting all the bike shops on a seperate map and will be putting it up for everyone, it looks like once you open them you can just turn what you want on and off, it looks like it would be perfect for what we want

I moved the Bike shops to the following map and made it so that everyone can add to it

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?moduleurl=http:%2F%2Fwww.heywhatsthat.com%2Fmapplets%2Fcontours.xml&ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=116365302506009153140.00048a1f6602ab9929d30&ll=40.491348,-79.919701&spn=0.120627,0.219383&z=12&lci=bike

I agree about adding the Bathrooms. the scary thing is the only one I can think of is in the riverfront park on the southside

I could be all over the "unofficial trail map". It would be free to anyone to edit as well. I actually have been tempted to to make a trail map of my area of Indiana Township. I know a few off-road trails from where I grew up and I feel like I could combine what I know with Dirt Rag's map. They're based in Indiana Township apparently... anyone have a map of theirs?

Either way, I could be all over that, and I could label them different colors depending on their condition or difficulty.

Impala26

I started a Map for Unofficial trails

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?moduleurl=http:%2F%2Fwww.heywhatsthat.com%2Fmapplets%2Fcontours.xml&ie=UTF8&hl=en&lci=bike&msa=0&ll=40.431269,-79.92588&spn=0.15497,0.363579&z=12&msid=116365302506009153140.00048a2a2527b3351f883

it is open so anyone can edit it. There are some trails near my house I have been meaning to explore and now I have reason to do so.

dback - there's that Plum Creek trail too, I was told it needs a bridge, so waders may be required. I don't know how early the crossing is, or if there's only one (I was only told of one). I think the park at the other end is Friendship park, though there was talk of it going through a trailer park as well.

That is the one I am thinking of. when I get home from house sitting and vacation I will have to find it and take a trip with my gps

if the GAP is going to be on there maybe this should just be a trails map... GAPs about as official as it gets.

also maybe unofficial could be in red and official could be in green

I was hoping people would use other colors, I had biking turned on when I made the map since I know many of the unofficial trails branch off of or are near or are continuations of existing marked official trails.

oic! i'm really into this map and will work on it when i get some time later in the week

It'd be useful to put a link to some master map that has all the sub maps in the my maps on one of the bike-pgh main pages. That way everyone has a link to all the latest sub maps. Assuming there can be some publicly visible bike-pgh google id mymaps page that is.

Is there some way to work public ratings into this too? You buzz up to green for the clean bathrooms, good bike shops, restaurants etc. and down to red for bad ones. There is an "edit details" link when I right click a POI but it is grayed out for me.

bd makes a good suggestion. But what this really means is making a commitment to maintenance; somebody has to keep the maps and comments up-to-date and generally make sure that things keep getting done over the long haul.

Bike Pittsburgh could get in front of this by providing (say) a member-editable wiki.

But actually something pretty useful can be cobbled together by using various (free) Google stuff (Maps, Sites).

Community wikis are insanely useful, but are tough to get rolling. For a successful case, see http://daviswiki.org/

I took a stab at it last fall when I had a broken arm and couldn't do much else. Put in dozens of hours of cleaning up and reorganizing the old Pittsburgh wiki.

If anyone is interested in helping revive it, I'm an admin over at http://pittsburgh.wikispot.org/

Wikispot is a nonprofit created by the guys who started the Davis wiki. They just got $350k grant to fund their software development for a better wiki.

As for colors I for the trail maps, I was thinking that since the "bike" overlay default color was that neon green, that unofficial trails that are relatively safe should be in blue, cautionary ones (rail crossings, private property, brush-covered, involves steps, etc.) should be yellow, and something like very difficult or very sketchy trails should be in red or something.

I already added a few to the map already, most of which are just "shortcuts". You can see what I mean with the colors I used.

I know about wikispot and that might be the right hosting solution. The bit I haven't really thought through is how to make things map-centric and easily accessible for casual users/contributors. In any case, for any of this to be successful it should stay focused on the original idea: map + bike-relevant annotations. People like the idea and see its usefulness, and it needs that to succeed.

BTW, anybody out there know the Google Maps API enough to field some questions about what may or may not be possible to implement? (For this biker map thing we're talking about.)

wikispot has primitive mapping functions and they are looking at this as an area to improve upon. To use it now, you can add one or more address or lat/long to an entry.

http://www.wikispot.org/Help_with_Maps

If you go here and click on Map at the top, it will show you the few places in Greenfield I added to the wiki.

To view a page with multiple points on it, try the map link on this page (zoom out to view both markers).

I think a wiki with photos, descriptions and directions to neat cycling related things would be more useful than a map with points and 4 word descriptions of said things. For example, if your tires are low, you would visit http://daviswiki.org/Bicycle_Tire_Pumps and find out where the nearest pump is, what it looks like, and also how to fill your tire.

You can still add locations to everything on that page, and it would show up as green markers on the map for that page.

a nice solution would be a java program using a database and the google maps api. anyone know who i can talk to about paying me to do this work? >8]

Hey, like totally, @HiddenVariable. Listen, I already have a couple of angels lined up. But they keep bugging me about this revenue model thing. Any ideas?

ha actually, i could come up with a few. i've thought about this sort of thing a lot (not precisely this tool, but useful internet tools and monetizing them, in general).

if only there were more bikers that were also nerds...

oh, the software wouldn't only be for bikers.

also: every bicyclist i've met in the last few years has also been a nerd. though it's probably selection bias.

I mucked with the maps api about 4 years ago to pull down MLS listings from a realtor web site and then map them all on one map before they started doing it themselves, but I mainly just took one of the map examples and made a perl script convert the realtor page to the map example format. So I can probably answer some basic questions on the API.

I really wish the google sites stuff played better with the rest of google's offerings and that they offered more of the database and scripting features of some of the other free hosting sites. Something as simple as a public google docs spreadsheet form to let people input data, buzz it up or down, and then a simple script to create one overlay map per spreadsheet tab with some colorization and icons shouldn't be that hard to throw together if you had all the pieces talking to each other nicely.

You can probably grab some existing public GPS POI files to create a relatively beefed up initial map, then charge people for in and out of map ads as well as being preferred stops on the route planner. Throw in some options to easily add POIs as destinations and "don't let me go more than 20 miles without a bathroom break" and you've got a pretty handy route planner without having to do much new work.

Please keep me in the loop if you are building a head of steam behind this.

HV... i was kiddin...

What would it take to integrate it with the existing online bike map at http://www.bike-pgh.org/onlinemap2/ ?

Another useful layer would be the "crash map" there, which doesn't seem to have many new incidents... a good thing? And, unfortunately, it might be worthwhile to have a category mapping out assaults, recent and not-so-recent, to see where they are clustered. I mean, "East Liberty Boulevard" is a pretty long road, and it's only a few intersections that have had problems, right?