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[SOLVED] Any luck/experience contributing more bike-friendly roads to Google Maps (self.bicycling)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by JackLSauce to c/bicycling

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I thought this would be dead simple but trying to label a road as "bike-friendly" isn't as intuitive as one would hope (am I "adding" a road even though it's technically there or reporting "wrong info" piece by piece?)

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

As someone who uses open street maps for statistics/analysis to advocate better bike infrastructure; please contribute to open street maps not google.

You can easily do exactly what you were saying; open up an existing road, add an attribute to it saying bike_friendly: true. Just login (on desktop), go to the part of the map you want to edit, click edit at the top and do the walkthrough. It should look like this

Side rant: The google maps API for analyzing data is so bad it might as well not exist. Even ignoring the painful signup process AUTH tokens, cost of usage, and crappy docs; it doesn't provide access to basically any useful information about roads. Meanwhile open street maps is so easy you don't even need an account; just run a browser command and scrape any data you want, including downloading the entire database.

[–] JackLSauce 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I had a feeling this would be the answer. I use OpenStreetMap for projects at work as the API was way easier (and the price made it a much easier sell to management) but hadn't used the mobile app until now but it's quite impressive

Only reservation is a question of whether or not a satellite view is available to check for the presence of sidewalks when not marked

edit: found the Mapillary add-on and 360-only filter. Really can't believe how extensive the coverage is. Sounds like there's no need to settle any longer