[SOLVED] Any luck/experience contributing more bike-friendly roads to Google Maps
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?)
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.
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
I might be wrong with this, but I think Google Maps gets some of its data from OpenStreetMap. You might be better off updating the road there and seeing if it transfers over.
It would probably take a while to go through, but even if it doesn't work, you will have added data to an open map that everyone can use :)
OSMAnd in particular is a nicer app for cycling anyway, and can be used completely offline (although it does take some time to adjust the interface).
For me, OSMAnd~ epitomizes FOSS: Can do literally everything, privacy friendly, completely offline, but incredibly ugly, and with a UX so horrible it keeps everyone but the idealists away.
I've been using the app for hiking for years and I still constantly find myself looking for the right menus or the back button behaving in unexpected ways. The search function is also basically unusable.