I’m showing a bit of my local pride with this bike map. This ride starts in Bellingham, loops around Lake Samish, and back. The whole ride is a little more than 20 miles. It’s a nice ride with a few hills at the beginning and end of the route. I love riding this on a nice sunny day. The ride past the crest of the hill on Samish is great. There is a good downhill slope and the scenery is really nice, especially along the lake. I also recommend this as a training ride. It isn’t really all that long but the hills can be killer if you aren’t used to riding a lot.
Today Google announced that they added a bike there option when asking for directions in Google Maps. Needless to say many, many people were pleased to hear the news. I’s been covered by nearly all the blogs I read about these subjects, such as:
- It’s time to bike
- Biking directions added to Google Maps
- Google Bike Directions Are Now Live!
- Google maps launches route finder for bicyclists
- And many, many more…
I won’t go over how cool this feature is except to say that I recreated my entire tour route from Blaine, WA to San Yisidro, CA using Google maps in about 20 min. It’s that good. Go see how awesome Google bike maps are for your self!
This has two big effects on my app. First, finding directions will be worlds better. Currently you have to add a bunch of way points to get a good route that follows bike friendly roads. With the bike there option for the maps nearly all of that will vanish. The directions service by Google will do that for you. Secondly, this will push me into another big round of development. My app uses the 2.0 version of Google maps and the bike there option is only available in version 3. That means I will have to rewrite nearly all of my app to get this to work. While I’m not very excited about the prospect of doing that the end result will definitely be worth it.
Until I get V3 working I’ll occasionally add more featured routes so keep checking back or better yet subscribe to the RSS feed.
This is part 2/2 of the Oregon Coast Bike Route. The route spans the entire coast, Astoria to Brookings. The route was created by the Oregon Department of Transportation. Most of the shoulders on the southbound side of scenic hwy 101 are widened and the route is very well signed. On top of that there are many state parks on the Oregon coast that have hiker/biker sites which charge only $4 per person per night. If that wasn’t cool enough many of those camp grounds have free hot showers!
This is part 1/2 of the Oregon Coast Bike Route. The route spans the entire coast, Astoria to Brookings. The route was created by the Oregon Department of Transportation. Most of the shoulders on the southbound side of scenic hwy 101 are widened and the route is very well signed. On top of that there are many state parks on the Oregon coast that have hiker/biker sites which charge only $4 per person per night. If that wasn’t cool enough many of those camp grounds have free hot showers!
This is a portion of the California Coast Bike Route. It hugs the coast the entire way and has excellent views all along the route. The breweries at either end of the routes are also excellent. Half Moon Bay offers more standard American brews with an imperial IPA that in my mind was very well balanced. Santa Cruz Mountain brewery offers more unique brews with a mix of styles from Europe and America. Don’t for get to stop at the Swanton Berry Farms north of Davenport. They have great fruit and give a 10% discount to bikers!
This is a portion of the Oregon Coast Bike Route. This section is especially excellent because it starts and ends with two great breweries. The Ft. George brewery is located in Astoria, OR and the Rogue Brewery is in Newport, OR. The riding between the two is mostly flat with great ocean views. I highly recommend spending some time at Devil’s Punchbowl SP and grabbing Mo’s chowder while you are there.
I’ve been doing some research on how I want to move the bike map creator app forward. I know that I want to tackle the ‘saved routes’ feature next. I’ve been avoiding doing any real work on the problem because it is new territory for me and I just didn’t know how I should move proceed.
Today I decided to sit down and whip out a rough draft of what is to come. My goal was to code a simple route in a kml file and load it into the the map creator app. After a few hours of tinkering and researching I did it! I’d love to hear your feedback on this so don’t be afraid to blow up the comments on the article page.
Below is the bike map creator app with a custom initialization script that loads a route saved on the server and plots the way points onto the map. The route I chose is one of my favorite local rides, Bellingham, WA to Deception Pass State Park. You can use the bike map creator below just like the official one. The only difference is the preloaded way points. To jump to the route just press the “Route” button and the route will be created and centered in the map.
Click on the map to add way-points. When you are finished click Plot Route.
Total Distance:
Plot your route, divide it into pages pages, then print!
- Click on the map to create way-points. When finished click ‘Find Route.’
- Divide the route into pages by panning and zooming to a viewpoint that provides a good level of detail. Then click ‘+ Panel.’ Repeat until all of the route is represented in a page.
- Click the print button to move to print mode. Click the printer icon or user your browser’s print function to print the pages.
Well I finally got around to implementing some of the interface changes that needed to happen. The goal was to make it more intuitive and streamlined. To make that happen I made the following changes:
- Plot mode is now ‘Route.’
- Panel mode is now ‘Divide.’
- Print mode is the same.
I’ve also started calling the ‘panels’ ‘pages.’ Which I think more people understand. I’ve also updated the print-out so that each page gets it’s own sheet of paper. I’ve also removed the ‘Font Size’ button. Now the font is always set to small. I think that size is easily readable and shouldn’t need to be adjusted. Along with that I’ve removed the text directions from all the modes but print. This removes the unnecessary clutter that they produce. Lastly I scrapped the old print mode and made a new one. When you move into print mode the main map recenters on the entire route and each page you have created gets it’s own map which is displayed below the main map. The text directions associated with each page are displayed alongside. Since all the pages are displayed you only need to print once!
The only new functionality I added was the ‘- Route’ button. This button takes a route which has been plotted and turns it back into waypoints. So if you wanted to adjust the route without having to start over you can click this button; move your waypoints; and plot the route again. I had actually created it a while ago but held off in releasing it because I didn’t think it was really necessary. I’m still not sold on it so if you like it give me some feedback.
I’ll be working toward making some way of loading/saving routes to a database after this. I’m guessing this will take a while so don’t think this site has died if nothing changes for a while.
You may have noticed a lack of activity on the site recently. It started with the Thanksgiving holiday and will continue through the new year. I have been doing some work to the bike map creator but I don’t have anything to show for it. A lot of what I’m doing is conceptual right now.
I had planned to focus on making some kind hardwired way to save/load routes but I realized that the interface (always) needs work. After talking to my roommate who isn’t a cyclist about the program I decided that I need to cut out some of the bloat in the program. You can expect to see the split function disappear along with a redesign of the plot and print modes.
In fact all of the modes are getting renamed. Plot, panel, and print is great for alliteration but I think it isn’t very clear what the purpose of each mode is. Right now the program is overly flexible. I think this makes designing the bike maps harder because the things that happen during each mode aren’t intuitive. Here are some of the areas I’m looking at:
- Text directions (they should show up sooner)
- Font size button should show up with the text directions
- Print mode is a mess, you really should only have to hit print once, not for every panel
- What the hell is a panel anyway? I think I might be the only one who knows
- The split function is slow and doesn’t really have a huge benefit considering that printing your own pages is cheap.
- Route editing could use some attention. What happens if you want to add a way-point in the middle of the route? Or you want to edit the route after it has been plotted?
- You probably can’t tell but the code is a mess…
- If the view point gets changed then clear text directions.
- Individual panel deletion needs to be added
That is a lot of stuff. I also just got a new job so my time to work on Ride Free Bike Maps has diminished a lot. The job requires that I get up super early too and my body is seriously rebelling against that right now. That means working on the site after work is just not gonna happen. My body needs rest and because of that my mind doesn’t function well at all (OOOH philosophy BONUS!). On top of all that I’m headed to Kauai for the first week of the new year and I will not be working on the site at all. You may see pics of some sort if I find neat bike stuff but most posts will head to my personal blog/facebook.
So there you have it. Stay tuned I will be adding to this site in the future. I really want to move on to the next phase where saving/loading bike maps will come into being but I must do this first.
I had this working last night but I ran out of time to upload the new code so here it is: the first functionality upgrade!
First off I added some route editing to the waypoints. The waypoints that are added to the map are now draggable. So if you decide you want to change their location after you created them you can just drag them to a new spot. Initially I thought this was going to be harder to do but it turned out to be a really easy fix.
Then I thought ‘Hey now that I’ve got that working I can also make a way to remove the waypoints.’ After a bit of easy code writing I’ve got that worked out too. Just click on a waypoint that has already been created and it will be deleted.
I knew taking state st. to the Boundry was the faster way to get there but bombing Holly on a bike is so much more fun!
I also added the Google Bar to the Map Creator was well. With the Google Bar you can search for specific addresses, specific businesses, or types of businesses and the results will be displayed on the map. When you open one of the info windows for a search result a ‘Add Waypoint’ link will be displayed under the standard content. If you click the link a waypoint will be added in the location of the search result. You can then plot the route as you normally would. You can also add waypoints after you have plotted your route if you want to mark some locations on the map (if I were planning another big tour I’d mark the location of all the breweries along the route).
I may make another update before the day is out. I just thought of an easy way to make the route editable after it has been plotted. So stay tuned!