Any idea why they haven't / are there plans to add cycle routes in the future? It seems like a glaring hole in functionality (more than "street view")
You can see similar assumptions in how Siri is designed. (“Users only speak one language at a time”) or the effectiveness of multilanguage support in autocorrect. Most people outside north america use their own language + english fairly frequently. At least those in apple’s customer demographic.
Bicycle directions are more challenging than directions for cars, public transit, and walking. I’m just speaking from my own personal experience, here. In every city I’ve lived in, I’ve had to test out different bicycle commuting routes until I found one which I liked. Walking and driving I will just take the fastest route and be done with it. Everyone has different preferences for bicycling for how much elevation climb they can handle, how much traffic they tolerate, etc.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/this-heat-map-shows-a-fundam...
Depending on your location, pedestrian traffic, streets, street traffic, etc. It might be best for you to be on the sidewalk. Or maybe you should instead be on the road since the road is only 25mph and there's pedestrians on the sidewalk. Maybe there's a bike lane, maybe there isn't. Maybe a town has a law saying you HAVE to bike on the road.
Are you allowed to cut through parking lots? Is it a dirt road? Can everyone's bikes handle dirt roads? What if it just rained, cars can still cross a wet dirt road, but I'd rather take a different route if possible on a bike.
That's not including the terrain challenges (which google seems to incorporate). I'd far rather take a route that takes an extra 5 minutes and is basically level vs a route that saves time but requires you to go down and uphill. Heck even wind conditions change can change the "optimal route" in some cases.
I think that's usually the case.
This page [1] says:
> The law in most areas of the country require bicycles to follow the same rules of the road as other motor vehicles. In essence, riding your bike down the sidewalk is the same as if you hopped the curb and started rolling it in your car.
[1] https://www.campfirecycling.com/blog/2008/07/09/top-5-rules-...
> Bicycles may be ridden upon a sidewalk, but cyclists must yield the right-of-way to pedestrians and are required to give an audible signal before overtaking and passing a pedestrian.
And to make it even more complicated:
> Further, official traffic control devices or local ordinances may restrict bicycles on sidewalks in some areas.
i.e. riding on the sidewalk is more of an exception, and is typically allowed for kids.
This is pretty common, I believe. I looked up my local (Cambridge MA) laws and they say the same thing (and have a list of the sidewalks you can't bike on), and New York state looks the same.
In the dot.ny.gov FAQs, they explicitly say that sidewalk riding is legal unless posted, but is specifically intended more for young children.
They have elevation, private/public roads, road surface, bike lanes, etc, and routers can take it into account. Of course, that doesn't really take into account varying laws, but that might be reflected in the maps themselves (private/public places, bikes allowed/disallowed, etc).
See also https://www.opencyclemap.org
They use the designations “town” and “city” as a way of ranking places in terms of importance.
Here in the UK that designation is almost arbitrary.
There are several large towns with greater population and navigational importance than surrounding smaller cities.
All the commercial map providers, including Apple Maps, grok that. Only opensteetmap seems still rigidly to the town < city thing. Would be much better if they could use population instead.
If the OSM project is just about data then it’s doing a great job.
If it’s about a usable navigation experience too then it’s failing because in the UK it doesn’t take local politics into account when deciding what to display.
FWIW OSM was founded and is still heavily influenced by the UK. As a UK user I like it that ceremonial cities are tagged and displayed as such. YMMV.
What I have a big problem with is that major towns, by both population and local importance, are left off the map until you zoom to a low level.
I find this annoying enough that I actively avoid OSM based sites because it. It makes using OSM difficult to see major towns in relation other major cities.
Meanwhile there’ll be a tiny ceremonial city with a huge label over it.
Depending on location indeed. The majority of US states still make it blanket illegal to bicycle on a sidewalk, codified into early highway laws. (It's also probable the last time those laws were effectively enforced was somewhere in the middle of the 20th Century.) There are states where it is illegal, but individual counties or cities (or strange in-betweens like townships) override their state laws and allow it. I don't know of any examples of the opposite where a state allows it, but individual towns forbid it, but I wouldn't be surprised.
- For a limited number of cities, determine which streets the city lists as having separated bike lanes, painted bike lanes, or city-designated "bike friendly" streets. Mark them on the map appropriately in a different map overlay (or on the transit overlay)
- Bicycle directions prioritize those streets.
It's not perfect, but this would be enough for me to use the app.
Most of the painted bike lanes I see in suburban Washington are painted in some of the least safe bike routes. There's a ton of bike lanes that are just painted along major thoroughfares with actual top speeds of 40 or 45 miles per hour.
They should really do it by speed limit and presence of features that obstruct car traffic. Streets that are a pain in the ass to drive on are the best streets to bike on.
Even some of the Bike Routes in Seattle are on roads that I wouldn't feel safe biking on because traffic typically clocks at 10 or 15 MPH higher than the speed limit around the curves on the route.
I run cycle.travel (https://cycle.travel/map) which offers super-fast bike directions in Europe, North America and Australia/NZ. It has a number of unique features under the hood that I think lift the quality of its routes above other similar sites (but then I would say that). Always happy to entertain offers if Apple want to buy me...