That’s right…Google Maps is now offering biking directions with their online version. Now, you have a drop down menu option to select bicycling as your route of choice. Once you put in your two destinations, Google Maps gives you several different route options that would be good to take by bike as you can see in the picture.
This is a great step forward for cyclists looking to plan their routes online, but it is going to have even more power when it becomes available on the mobile platform. Can you imagine having this feature on your iPhone as you ride from location to location in your city?
In the picture above, I picked two local bike shops in our area to get an idea of how this whole system works. As you can see, it picks more “bike friendly” roads in the routing process completely bypassing any highways and four lane roads (at least in this example). If you do not like the roads it picked, you can choose from alternate routes available in the sidebar.
What do you think?