Google Bike Map route from Poly to Lake Montebello.

by FERN SHEN

Baltimore bicyclists are checking out a new tool this week, Google’s long awaited bike map application, unveiled yesterday in Washington.

The idea: you plug in a starting point and a destination and the software gives you the bike-friendliest route. This feature is in beta mode and Google asks users to report errors or suggest changes.

But for now, right out of the box, how good is it in Baltimore?

Our street-savvy, two-wheeled readers will have to road test it and tell us. We gave it a couple of mapping jobs and found itpretty good, though sometimes puzzling.

 Iit might be hard to factor in some preferences. What if you find it more important for your bike ride to be pretty than flat?

Cyclists have been clamoring for this

Similar software exists, but obviously, the 800-pound-gorilla-of search-engines-that-is-Google needed to make bike mapping possible. A group called googlemapsbikethere.org collected more than 51,000 signatures asking for it.

What Google has done is load the software with information intended to point cyclists to bike paths or lanes whenever possible and help them avoid busy roads, intersections and hills. Baltimore is one of 150 cities where the search engine giant has made the feature available.

They’ve gotten a lot of their data from Rails-to-Trails Conservancy , with whom they partnered for this project. For those who want to get more algorithmic, you can go here to check out a discussion of everything they factored in.

The dark green lines are bike trails, where there are no motor vehicles, the light green lines are for places with bike lanes and the dashed lines indicate other streets recommended for biking.

Google Bike Maps route from University Pkwy. to Princeton Sports.

Mapping my ride

My quick stabs at route mapping today using this tool included a hypothetical Saturday morning bike ride from University Parkway in Roland Park up to Princeton Sports on Falls Road, to get some exercise and buy some cool bike jersey, say. 

Google shows the route with a blue line and says the trip should take 28 minutes.

One anomaly is the dark green line Google shows me on the part of University Parkway between 40th Street and the Roland Avenue split. This is not accurate at the moment, since the white bike lane lines there disappeared during last year’s road resurfacing.  (Presumably that will square up once the lines go back on?)

The rest of the suggested route is pretty straightforward: north on Roland Avenue, left on Lake Avenue and right on Falls Road. Google didn’t have many choices to help me avoid the narrow shoulders and sometimes-whizzing traffic on Lake or Falls. They could have shaved off the Lake Avenue part and sent me down Bellemore Road. There’s a function that lets you drag the blue line to the place you prefer and customize the route, so maybe I’ll do that.

On another task, getting me from the parking lot of Baltimore Polytechnic High School to Lake Montebello, they did choose just that kind of little odd detour, presumably to avoid a bit of steepness and traffic.

How Google mapped a bike ride from Poly to Lake Montebello.

The route Google proposes in this case detours away from that section of University Parkway with the bike lanes that are not currently painted as such. It sends me through Medfield and behind Hoes Heights.

 Perhaps this is to avoid that steep-and-hazardous climb up Cold Spring Lane to the intersection with Roland Ave., a stretch where a biker would have to be on the sidewalk to avoid car danger? 

Google Bike Maps, Poly to Lake Montebello, close-up.

Maybe I’ll try it and take a detour into Hoes Heights, a neighborhood I’ve been meaning to check out ever since I read Jamie Smith Hopkins’ piece in the Sun, with a resident’s glowing description of the place. (“Large backyards and gardens give the neighborhood a rustic feeling, and an outhouse or two still stands as a reminder of the old days.”) There’s even a picture of one of those outhouses.