Riding a bicycle can be a very pleasurable experience. Many people even use their bicycles to commute to work every day which can be a great exercise and a powerful tool for reducing carbon emissions.
However, if you are not familiar with the area, it can be a very scary experience. You can end up fighting with large SUVs Trucks and F-150s on busy roads. That’s what triggered a petition which was started by Peter Smith prodding Google to add a bike direction to Google maps.
“It was kind of terrible, because there’s a lot of big trucks down there in Austin, and I was getting passed by these big Ford F-150s or whatever,” Peter recalled. “And I was like, ‘this is crazy!’ ”
The petition received over 51 thousand signatures and today Google granted their wish.
Today, Google unveiled a new function in Google Maps that provides turn by turn biking direction.
To use the new biking directions you need to click on the ‘Get Directions’ link in Google Maps and choose the ‘Bicycling’ option from the drop down menu. When you select the ‘Bicycling’ option the map view will change to show the roads and paths that are suitable for biking. Bike paths with no cars are shown in dark green and roads with bike lanes are shown in light green.
The Biking directions in Google Maps is currently in Beta and only available in the U.S. Google asks users to use caution and report unmapped bike routes and streets that aren’t suited for cycling.
Here is a video on how the biking directions works:
