Bike tech is Hot: Google Maps gets help from 10,000 bicyclist beta testers

Google announced on Wednesday that it has expanded the bicycle mapping feature of Google Maps to include 80 new cities, thanks to an overwhelming response from its community of beta testers.

In March, Google introduced the beta of bike routes in Google Maps, a feature which lets users plan directions optimized for bicycle transportation. When we ran a story about this, it got a tremendous amount of traffic, beating nearly everything else the whole week in terms of unique reads.

Since that time, I've talked to a number of other tech publications who have begun to lump bike technology news into their coverage because it ends up being so popular.

Today, Dave Barth, Google Maps Product Manager confirmed the sentiment in the Google Lat Long Blog: Bike Tech is hot stuff.

Over 10,000 beta testers submitted approximately 25,000 suggestions to Google for improvements to the bike maps feature in Maps, and bike trails and dedicated lanes in 80 more cities have been added to the 150-city bike trail database from the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy.

"We always knew the cycling community would be a passionate bunch, but the response to both our biking directions feature and our call to join in the effort to improve our bike maps has surpassed our happiest expectations," Barth wrote. "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."