Today, Google introduced a fancy new feature – bike trail data for cities all over the U.S. You can use Google Maps to find cycling-specific directions in cities, and by default Google Maps will plan your route to avoid steep hills. Pretty cool. Here’s a quote from the Google team.
“Today we’ve added biking directions and extensive bike trail data to Google Maps for the U.S. My team has been keeping close tabs on all the public support for biking directions that’s been steadily coming in, but we knew that when we added the feature, we wanted to do it right: we wanted to include as much bike trail data as possible, provide efficient routes, allow riders to customize their trip, make use of bike lanes, calculate rider-friendly routes that avoid big hills and customize the look of the map for cycling to encourage folks to hop on their bikes. So that’s exactly what we’ve done.”
We have to admit that after the first look, this should be pretty cool. Cyclist should appreciate how you can quickly find a best route.