Early praise for Google Maps' bike routes
Seeing where you're going, and where you shouldn't go
Perhaps the most wonderful feature of this service, which pedestrians already discovered, is the opportunity to blend Street View with maps to let you walk the route ahead of time. This way you see in advance all the landmarks you'll encounter along the way -- the waypoints that let you remember in your head what to look for and where to turn. Here is where I encountered a little bug in the program, and you can actually see it if you look closely here.
Street View should show you a blue line, coordinating with the blue line in the overhead map, to let you follow the suggested route. The overhead map, shown below, appears correct -- travel west on 54th St., and turn left at the Trail. The landmark at that turn is one of my favorite Italian restaurants in all the world, Mama Carolla's. In the photograph, notice the trail runs right alongside it.
Notice also that the map's blue line has you making a left turn at Mama's onto the Trail (correct), but that Street View has you making a right turn. What happened here? A check of the turn-by-turn directions reveals that, for some strange reason, Maps wants you to travel down 54th St. for 72 extra feet, then make a U-turn, head back the other direction, and make a right turn. It's probably a little database problem, where the point of contact with the Monon Trail meets up with the street is off by a few feet. Nevertheless, if you printed off these directions so you could follow them from your bike, you'd be confused at this point.
Here's also where you discover a problem that Google can't solve, at least not right away: You can't take a Street View walk down pedestrian trails. There's an obvious reason for this: Towns don't want Google going down walking trails snapping shots of people anonymously.
The next best thing is to try to reposition yourself (the little orange man on the overhead map, who I've noticed isn't on a bike) on actual street intersections along the way. Here's where the software starts to fail: I should be able to just click on the blue path at an intersection where there's a photo. Instead, I have to drag the little man up in the air (he actually "flies" while this is happening, like a repositioned character in Peter Molyneux's game "The Movies") and deposit him in the vicinity of the blue line. Where it ends up dropping him, despite what the pointer says, could be up to three blocks out of the way.
The problem here appears to be with the front end of the program, not with the fundamental design. If you'll recall earlier my statement that you can know everything, the way you do so is by listening and learning. Google Maps is, to its great credit, capable of doing this: In cases where I know full well a certain route is safer or better than another, I can drag the blue line where I believe it should go. Not only is that an easy way for me to plan my own route, but for Google, it's a source of new information: If Google is smart about this (and there's no reason for me to believe it isn't), it will learn from my changes and those of others, and may suggest safer routes for other Maps users in the future.
But it can only do this if it gets its front end right first. The slightly incorrect portion of its suggested route for my trip downtown was a 72-foot diversion that actually does show up when you zoom in the map. But partly because the granularity of the line-dragging routine does not appear to be as fine as the map's own zoom capability, and partly because the U-turn is a three-step process which Google Maps presumes must lead from point to point to point in every circumstance, my attempt to simply shave off the U-turn in the directions was mistaken as a way for me to take a lap around the strip mall parking lot, shown here.
Because Google is leveraging its massive platform in multiple areas to provide an exclusive service that wouldn't have been feasible on its own, little adjustments can have big consequences. Someplace within the Google database right now, there's probably the recording that some Indy cyclist weirdo suggested that instead of a simple 72-foot loop around the middle of 54th St., one should take a big two-block oval around the strip mall. As long as that little route-adjustment bug is in there, the validity of information Google is gleaning from changes that sensible people are making to suggestions everywhere, may end up not being very sensible. And as a result, over time, someone will probably be advised to walk one mile north in order to get on the route that leads her 1.1 miles south.
Despite that little discovery, I can easily see where Google Maps will become an invaluable tool for bicyclists who want to explore not only their home town, but areas of the world they've never been. I can imagine a depression in car rentals across the country. I'm also imagining folks with their Android GPS-enabled phones in their pockets maybe someday getting spoken directions. "Turn left onto Monon Trail...No, silly, your other left."