This Just In: googlemaps for bikes!

[OakLeaf]

Too many other methods to get better information.

Having bicycled and motorcycled through a good part of the eastern US, I'm not aware of any better method to determine whether or not a road is paved or even exists. AAA isn't reliable, Navteq (who I believe is where Garmin gets their maps from) isn't reliable. It's definitely worth checking the aerial maps on Yahoo and Bing as well as Google, since each one is updated on a different schedule, and you want the most recent one. You could write the county engineer in every county you plan to travel through and maybe get a timely answer, but that gets cumbersome pretty quickly.

I mean, your neighborhood is still on the images, right? Or have they taken those down, too?

This is no different from the stories that went around a year or two ago about people who drove through barriers because their GPS told them to. You still gotta use your eyes...



ETA: It's true that Google is going through some growing pains right now w/r/t their wanting to avoid paying for intellectual property. I'd guess that's probably what's going on in your neighborhood.