Get your helmets on! Google is adding cycling directions to Maps within Australia, letting you plot the best route from A to B on your trust bike and incorporating known cycle paths.
When searching for directions, you can now select cycling along with the familiar driving and walking options. You can also view a cycling layer to see bike paths in an area (dark green for cycling paths, light green for dedicated cycling lanes on roads, and dashed green for recommended roads) — just mouse over the layers icon in the top right and ensure ‘Bicycling’ is selected.
As regular readers know, I won’t be happy until Google Maps also adds public transport directions for every Australian capital city (Perth and Adelaide residents can feel smug here). But that doesn’t mean this isn’t a great addition.
Ride on! Cycling comes to Google Maps in Australia [Google Australia Blog]
Google Transit in Melbourne seems to be a very low priority for the government ... almost a year ago this was the state of things: http://www.ptua.org.au/2011/08/23/timetable-data/ ... here's hoping that things have moved on since then :-(
Seems to be low priority in Brisbane too... TransLink promised it would happen by the end of 2010, and we're still waiting.
comparing it to opencyclemap.org shows it has a long way to go - it's missing quite a bit near my house, and plenty of paths seem to have chunks missing along their length.
It's a great start despite that. Being able to load up cycle-friendly directions directly on my phone will be awesome.
Great! Cycling maps aren't available on android maps or navigation yet, but hopefully that's on its way soon.