This Just In: googlemaps for bikes!

[SadieKate]

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...

In this part of the world, it is very difficult to tell from Google images whether a street is paved or not. Everything shows as varying widths of gray. Pavement, dirt, gravel, rocks, everything. An old FS road over boulders still looks like a standard old chip seal road in the images. I experienced this on a run just a few weeks ago. Maps, images and reality didn't jive. But I bet a cyclist, runner, equestrian family with the area could have told me. AAA, gazetteers, FS maps, at least state the type of road so you can err on the side of caution.

Yes, our neighborhood is still on the image but so what? If someone else tries to map to our house, they'll end up in a gravel pit over half a mile a way. They also won't get turn by turn directions.

Google also provides incorrect info about connecting roads (our street is not continuously connected) and directions on roads that haven't existed in years. You can also be directed onto private gated property (as in the incorrect mapping to our house).

Why contact each county engineer? There are plenty of internet sites where people ask and receive info about recommended routes from people who use the route. These could then be manually mapped on Google but I sure won't trust Google to create the route from scratch. I will take AAA over Google every time.

BTW, Bing has far more up to date images for our area.

Feel free to do whatever you want, but don't use Google Maps in Central and Southern Oregon unless you want to hear from me "I told you so."