I've noticed a few people posting gmap-pedometer.com routes so I thought I'd mention a site I stumbled across tonight: http://veloroutes.org/bikemaps/seattle/
It's pretty cluttered and I bet it only works well on Firefox, but some of the neat clutter includes an elevation overlay, a King County bike map overlay, and an instant "go X mph to arrive in Y minutes" calulation.
Plus you only need to single-click to move the map when you're making a route. Score.
Aaron
Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 11:13 pm
Joined: 25 Jul 2005Posts: 4645
Whomever wrote the hill notes doesn't have a clue about steep hills. They think going south on 12th to Beacon Hill is a "big one!"
They also recommend heading north on Harbor around Alki to get into West Seattle. They tell you that Fauntleroy is a big hill. Bikes cannot ride on Fauntleroy going into WS because it is the Freeway!
With such bad info, I suspect the rest of it is inaccurate as well.
ksep
Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2007 12:55 am
Joined: 27 Jan 2007Posts: 1879Location: Westlake
Ah, you're being too hard on the (apparently) user-generated content for a site that only launched two months ago. Some of them are accurate: "denny way heading east - get ready to climb some steep shit, just about all the way up to 15th ave"
mattm
Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2007 10:29 am
Joined: 20 Dec 2006Posts: 13Location: captiol ill
i love veloroutes.org, but then again i'm kinda biased, seeing as how i run it.
to clear up a few things:
* the hills: i was talking about most of those hills on my fixie. i live in seattle, but i'm not an expert in local topography or routes; i guess i'm assuming that people will take the notes with a grain of salt, like anything else on the interweb.
* it should work in IE just like firefox
* yes it's cluttered, sorry. i'm not that good with html/css shit
thanks for the feedback, i'm always trying to make the site better.
P.S. what features do .83'ers want in a bike mapping site? bar locations? smoke spots?
now with 50 percent more EVILJoined: 22 Jul 2005Posts: 10566
might be cool to have a button to auto turn on and off local features like hangouts, bike shops, hill info, watering holes, parks, drifter camps, and hooker pick up hotspots.
henry
Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2007 10:51 am
somewhat piggishJoined: 05 Aug 2005Posts: 5415Location: on porch with shotgun
You could do a ton for the interface by changing the icons you use for the cameras to something smaller and simpler, IMO.
But it looks cool, i've never checked that out before.
Joined: 15 Aug 2006Posts: 2666Location: No Fun Town, USA
I think the King County Bike Map overlay is a good idea in theory, but in practice the overlay looks like shit if you magnify it, which you generally need to do if you want anything better than back of an envelope estimates.
In summary, you need a bike map with a much finer scale for the overlay to work.
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lantius
Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2007 11:12 am
1337Joined: 22 Jul 2005Posts: 6705Location: right over
w3 has xhtml and css validators that you may find useful.
i agree with henry btw, you should use smaller and simpler icons for your various indicators.
to make the bike map overlay work you really need to figure out how to isolate it down to just the major lines. you should be able to do that with photoshop or imagemagic... in fact with color filters you might even be able to vectorize it, though i've never done that programatically.
jillita
Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2007 2:17 pm
Joined: 13 Oct 2005Posts: 744Location: the westside
It'd be sweet if you could get the original GIS data from KC and overlay it on the map. I know you can do that with Google Earth, but I'm not sure about Google Maps. Otherwise if you got the data you might be able to create your own high-rez image sans extraneous clutter to use as a base layer instead of their pixelated one. OR you could contact them and see if they already have a high-rez image you can use. I bet they do.
I think the King County Bike Map overlay is a good idea in theory, but in practice the overlay looks like shit if you magnify it, which you generally need to do if you want anything better than back of an envelope estimates.
In summary, you need a bike map with a much finer scale for the overlay to work.
indeed, the overlay is not really that useful currently, it was kindof a proof-of-concept thing that i'd kindof forgotten about. i was waiting for people to notice and request something more, and it looks like now is that time. =]
the problem is that with a hi-res version of the image is that peeps using slow connections will have to wait 30+ secs for download... not good.
i think i need to break the overlay into tiles, like what they do for the regular/satellite google maps. if my server has a set of tiles for each zoom level then you never end up with a blurry image, no matter how far you zoom.
as for the seattle GIS data, i'm gonna check it out and see if i can work that data into the site; maybe then i could make a trip-planner like http://bycycle.org does.
thanks again for the feedback .83'ers, this is good stuff. i hear what y'all are saying about the icon-sizes, i'm gonna be making the UI prettier in the next few weeks, stay tuned.
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