Maps for people who don't drive

This is just a wonderful, wonderful story (via the excellent StreetsBlog). It turns out there's a cycling union in Holland (where else), which actually does really useful things instead of just screaming and shouting a lot. In this case, they put a wiki together to create a cycle route planner for the Utrecht area, including thousands of bicycle lanes which didn't appear on the GPS route-planning devices used by cars.

The volunteers needed to be much more precise than commercial digital map makers for car navigation devices, jotting down details such as road surface, scenery and if a road is well lit.
"Detail is what cyclists need and what makes this so valuable. You need to be able to choose a safe route at night, and a racing cyclist wants a hard bike lane and no dirt roads," said 34-year-old Erik Jonkman, one of 70 volunteers.

Because it's a wiki, errors get corrected quickly and easily. And of course it should scale very easily as well, at least within Holland. The whole thing sounds great.

The story also reminded me of something I've never understood about New York, a city where most people travel by subway. If you look at any street map of London, all the tube stations are very clearly marked. But if you look at any street map of New York, except for the subway map itself, which isn't much of a street map, there are never any subway stations on it. So if you're looking at a certain address, you have to have the whole subway system essentially memorized – or else have a copy of the subway map to hand – in order to work out how to get there.

This is particularly, and annoyingly, true of online maps from the likes of Mapquest or Google. Many stores and venues in New York helpfully link their addresses to an online map page which shows where they are in the city – but you can never see, from that map, where the nearest subway stations are. Indeed, I'm not even sure that there is any online resource where you can just type in an address and get back a list of the nearest subway stations. Even Hopstop, which presumably could offer the service very easily, doesn't.

Posted by Felix at 11:58 EST

Comments

Hope this helps. If, though, you're trying to find out what the nearest Staten Island Railroad stop to Killmeyers is, you're still out of luck.

Posted by: Gari N. Corp at 15:10 EST, July 26, 2006

Yes, although you still need to eyeball it: it doesn't actually come out and tell you what the nearest subway is. But it's still a good start.

Posted by: Felix at 15:21 EST, July 26, 2006

www.camcycle.org.uk Cambridge Cycling Campaign (England UK) has just launched an interactive mapping tool for bike routes.

Posted by: Jean Sinclair at 6:19 EST, July 27, 2006

Actually, you can find the closest subway stop to an address on Hopstop.com.

http://www.hopstop.com/?action=map_home

It also shows nearest bus stops or a combination of the two.

Posted by: matt at 9:18 EST, July 27, 2006

We are working on getting the Staten Island Line on the http://www.onnyturf.com/subway map as well as directions. Directions we will have very soon. Shoot, I should just give up a saturday and do the Staten Island Line.

Posted by: Will at 11:27 EST, July 27, 2006

The London Underground route planner, http://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk/user/XSLT_TRIP_REQUEST2?language=en

not only tells you how to get from one address to another (door-to-door) by public transport, but also by bike, and it does use cycle lanes.

Posted by: Matthew at 8:32 EST, July 30, 2006