Page 59 of 173

Google Maps’s lies are why I made my own bike map

October 22, 2013 / / 28 Comments
http://goo.gl/maps/BlIZF

Bright green lines indicate trails while darker green lines indicate bike lanes.

Because Google Maps lies about where bike facilities are. Check out the bicycling layer at 16th Street and Wood Street in Pilsen, Chicago, Illinois.

Google Maps bicycling layer legend

Google Maps bicycling layer legend

The bright green lines represent trails, but the ones in this part of Pilsen are not trails. All of the north-south “trails” you see are actually sidewalks underneath railroad viaducts. The east-west trails…well, I’m not sure what they are but they are on elevated railroad property. Don’t go up there.

I created my own bike map to deal with the inaccuracies across Google Maps. I used my local knowledge (“ground truth”) and high-quality bike facility data from the Chicago Department of Transportation.

I also used contributions to OpenStreetMap, mainly for trails. I’ve been correcting and adding new bike lane data to OSM as CDOT installs them. View this area with OpenCycleMap’s tiles, which shows only bike lanes on 18th Street.

If you’re an editor on Google’s Map Maker data editing platform, please correct these errors. I would do it except that Google doesn’t allow others to benefit from my data contributions like OpenStreetMap does, where anyone can give and take. (I also had a negative experience on Map Maker, getting myself into a tiff with an unnamed user who disagreed with my changes, based on a personal visit to the location, that were not visible on the satellite imagery because that location had outdated imagery.)

 

How to convert bike-share JSON data to CSV and then to shapefile

October 9, 2013 / / 6 Comments

Update January 4, 2013: The easiest way to do this is to use Ian Dees’s Divvy API as it outputs straight to GeoJSON (which QGIS likes). See below.

For Michael Carney’s Divvy bike-share stations + Census tract + unbanked Chicagoans analysis and map he needed the Divvy station locations as a shapefile. I copied the JSON-formatted text of the Divvy real-time station API, converted it to CSV with OpenRefine, and then created a shapefile with QGIS.

Here’s how to create a shapefile of any bike-share system that uses hardware from Public Bike System Co based on Montréal and is operated by Alta Bicycle Share (this includes New York City, Chattanooga, Bay Area, Melbourne, and Chicago): Continue reading

San Francisco is an expensive place to get around

October 9, 2013 / / 6 Comments

$8.15 if you want to exit the San Francisco airport via public transit.

In June I visited friends in San Francisco and attended the State of the Map US conference. I spent a lot of money on transit and bicycle rentals. This doesn’t exclude the cost of driving to Davis, California.

BART

Airport to 16th/Mission: $8.15
Union City to North Berkeley: $4.10
16th/Mission to Berkeley (roundtrip): $7.60
16th/Mission to airport: $8.15

I needed to travel from Stanford University (where my friend Stefano does research) to Berkeley (to visit Rock The Bike) and the cheapest and soonest way to get there was to take the Dumbarton Express bus across the lower San Francisco Bay to the Union City BART station. 

Dumbarton Express
Bus from Stanford to Union City BART: $2.10

Caltrain
22nd Street to Stanford (Mountain View): $7.00 (Google Maps says it would cost $21.99 to drive this trip)
Stanford (Mountain View) to 4th/King: $7.00

Total for 8 transit trips: $44.10

In Chicago, if I had taken all trips individually (no transfers), my cost would be about $31.75. To compare Caltrain to Metra, I calculated the cost of a trip from downtown Chicago to Geneva, which is $6.75 each way. This includes the $5.00 trip cost to get out of O’Hare airport, significantly less than BART’s $8.15.

I didn’t ride Muni trains (they’re kind of slow compared to bicycling) but I took a lot of photos of them arriving at Duboce Park. 

Bicycling

Bike rental in Davis, California for 3 hours: $10
Bike rental via Spinlister for 4 days: $72

This is the Surly Long Haul Trucker I rented via Spinlister, seen on the BART train in the roomy bike spot. For the most part, the bike can rest here without any securement. 

This is the charge I’m least concerned with, except that Spinlister charges me a 12.5% service fee). I also picked it up in Stanford because that’s where the bike owner lived; it was the best alternative of the available bikes for people my height as it was a bike I liked (Surly Long Haul Trucker) and it was $16 per day, the cheapest by $9 per day!

Part of the OpenStreetMap conference included a trip to the California Academy of Sciences on the Friday before the meetings started. The SCUBA diver on the left is cleaning the glass while the diver on the right is talking to the museum worker outside the pool. 

Not having a bicycle in a place I visit makes me feel naked. Having the bicycle reduced my potential fees on getting around. I had to move from my friend’s house to the OpenStreetMap conference (which would have required two transit trips or a taxi), between the conference and downtown for the World Naked Bike Ride, and between the conference and Sunday Streets in Dog Patch and Mission Bay. I also biked to Golden Gate Park to visit the California Academy of Sciences, pedaled over to see the Aether shop made with three shipping containers, joined SF Bike Party on Friday night, and biked around Berkeley to see Paul Freedman at Rock The Bike.

I left the OpenStreetMap conference during Sunday’s lunch to check out Sunday Streets. Even though I sold my Yuba Mundo for a WorkCycles Fr8, I love seeing families on cargo bikes.

Divvy considers my suggestions in bike-share kiosk map redesign

October 8, 2013 / / 8 Comments

The new design that will appear at the newest stations first and then rolled out to all stations. 

I posted two months ago a critique of the Divvy bike-share maps, seen at 284 stations scattered around Chicago, focusing on the clutter of having so many maps (with the third being useless), unclear labels and labels that covered map objects, and the low prominence of the smartphone app and map legend. Two weeks ago the Divvy public relations manager emailed me a screenshot of the new map design and said that these points had been changed. He said they considered four of my suggestions:

  1. Make CycleFinder, the official Divvy smartphone app, more prominent
  2. Change “You are here” design to make it clear where you are
  3. Make streets and streets’ label text smaller
  4. Removed service area map and make legend more prominent

I replied to the manager and suggested that the “You are here” label be made slightly transparent to show that the road does continue beneath it.

Close-up of the original “you are here” design that covered up other objects and wasn’t centered in the walking distance circle.

Update on my work this summer: Chicago Bike Guide now on Android

October 8, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Yesterday I released the first version of my app for the Android operating system. The Chicago Bike Guide (born the Chicago Offline Bike Map) had been available for iOS since April 2012 and the most frequent question I heard was, “When will you have an Android version?” At first I was probably joking when I said it was coming soon as I had no interest in it. But things change: more people kept asking, I was slowly learning how to publish an app for Android, I bought a tablet myself on which to test it, and Android eclipsing iOS as the most dominant mobile OS had some effect.

I use PhoneGap software to compile the Chicago Bike Guide for iOS. My app is actually an HTML5 compliant website using jQueryMobile and PhoneGap allows this website to interact with some of the hardware on the iPhone (like the GPS components) and software (native notification buttons). PhoneGap compiles for Android and other operating systems, but my experience using the Android emulator put a damper on my progress.

I would install Google’s software development kit (SDK), including Eclipse, and load the app (er, website) into the emulator and it would be terribly slow. It didn’t emulate the Android experience very well. I did this twice; I don’t remember making any additional progress the second time but I probably made different progress, slightly expanding my understanding of how to make Android apps.

PhoneGap 3.0.0 came around, and its use requires focusing on the command line to build apps. In prior versions, for iOS, you would add “helper software” to Xcode but now it creates the Xcode project for you. It was easier to use this time around, as the process in this version was simpler to understand, use, and the documentation had improved. I felt it was time to try again to make an Android version so I “made the plunge” and bought the Asus MeMO Pad HD 7″ tablet from my local Micro Center.

At first I used the tablet to test my app (website) as a website, loading it over the network from my Mac’s web server. After fixing a lot of the display bugs I moved into native app testing. One command, “cordova build android”, and an APK I can email to my tablet appears 30 seconds later. This is one of the few areas where Android has iOS beat in terms of testing.

The iOS development environment requires so much setting up with developer profiles, team profiles, and other gunk I forget the names of. With Android, you simply email the ChicagoBikeGuide-debug.apk file to your device and open it in the Gmail app. Voilá.

After getting this far I stopped progress on developing for Android as I wanted to issue a new version for iOS with features and bug fixes I’d been working on since the last release in July (version 0.8.2). With that out of the way last week, and the new version waiting for Apple’s review, I worked on the Android version on Sunday and finished it today.

Did you catch that? I uploaded version 0.8.3 for iOS on October 3 and it’s been in review since then while in less than 24 hours I set up my Google Play Developer Console ($25 per year), merchant account, store listing, and started selling the Android version.

N.B. Google Play doesn’t allow you to switch the app between free and not free like the iTunes App Store does, so I cannot release it for free during a short promotional period like I did for the iOS platform.

After a sufficient period (a few days, perhaps) of no reports of it crashing, I will promote the Android version heavily.