Tag: Google Maps

The best way to store directions on your smartphone is low tech

May 18, 2015 / / 3 Comments
map of southern illinois as seen in the OsmAnd app

OsmAnd has great offline mapping features but it was tedious to ensure I had all of the maps at the desired zoom levels for the three-city bike ride in southern Illinois (pictured).

My friend is going to pick up a unique bicycle in Ohio and ride it back to Chicago. He designed a good route on Google Maps but now he needs to save it to his smartphone so he doesn’t have to constantly load directions and use data and waste battery life.

I gave him these instructions:

The best way to get a mobile view of the route is to use the Google Maps print feature and save it as a PDF. Then transfer that PDF to your phone through the Dropbox app. Then, in the Dropbox app, mark the PDF file as a favorite so that it’s stored offline, onto the phone.

There’s probably an app that can do what he wants, but I don’t know about it. There are hundreds of “maps” apps to sort through in each the App Store for iOS and the Play Store for Android.

In fact, I’ve downloaded OsmAnd, an offline maps app, for my Android tablet. I installed it and tried to learn how to use it in order to follow a downstate, intercity bike camping route. The app, though, required that you zoom in to each part of the map you wanted to store and then press “download”.

 

I spent 30 minutes downloading parts of the map, manually panning to the next section, before I decided to instead obtain one of the Illinois Department of Transportation’s regional bike maps and just draw it on there and write out a “cue sheet” (turn by turn directions).

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.)

 

Get out of Googleville: my presentation on web mapping

February 18, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Alternate headlines: Google Maps versus OpenStreetMap; why OpenStreetMap is better than Google Maps

I presented to the Chicago GIS Network Meetup group on February 5,2013, about alternatives to Google when it comes to mapping on the web. I created the presentation and outline a couple hours before giving it and came up with this slideshow with three frames.

Googleville 1 of 3

Google Maps and its data is a one-way street (or many one-way streets). Google will take data but won’t give it back.

Googleville 2 of 3

Google Maps has all of these features, but they’re easier to manipulate when you use an alternative. Alternatives like: MapBox, TileMill, OpenLayers, OpenStreetMap (made easy with JOSM), GeoCommons – I’m sure there are plenty more.

Googleville 3 of 3

OpenStreetMap is the Wikipedia of online mapping and geographic data. Considering switching to OSM.

Mapping guns in your town: is that okay?

December 25, 2012 / / 6 Comments

This screenshot shows the pistol permit holders in Westchester County, New York. The highest density of permit holders appears to be at the border with Bronx County, also known as the northern edge of New York City. 

An ABC News story I read through the Yahoo! News website tells about The Journal News, covering Westchester (Yonkers, New Rochelle) and Rockland (New City, Pomona) counties in New York, posting the names and addresses, on a map, of gun permit owners. The map contains:

…the addresses of all pistol permit holders in Westchester and Rockland counties. Each dot represents an individual permit holder licensed to own a handgun — a pistol or revolver. The data does not include owners of long guns — rifles or shotguns — which can be purchased without a permit. Being included in this map does not mean the individual at a specific location owns a weapon, just that they are licensed to do so. [Notice that some dots are outside the county.]

This article is interesting to me for two reasons:

1. The article has hyperlinks to the (alleged?) Facebook profiles of two people who commented on The Journal News’s website. I predict this will only become more common. I don’t have a Facebook profile to link to.

2. The rationale to make a map seems reasonable: so people know where there are potentially guns in their neighborhood. It seems reasonable that people want to know where there are potential sources of danger and harm near them.

The names and addresses were obtained through “routine” (their words, not mine, but it is pretty routine and normal) Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The quantity and types of guns are not considered to be public record, although this may not be true, according to the ABC News article.

Be your own traffic and road planner

October 16, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Wanna know how many cars were measured to pass by on a street near you (in Chicago)?

Want to know how wide a street is?
Want to do this without leaving your house?

You can.

1. Find the “ADT” (average daily traffic) for roads in Chicago on the city’s Traffic Tracker website. Average is a misnomer, though, because that implies more than one count has been taken or estimate has been made. The last time the city counted cars in Chicago was 2006; I imagine the difference in counts taken this year would be statistically significant (meaning any differences would not be by chance or random).

To find a location in Traffic Tracker:

  1. You can pan and zoom the map until you find it, or you can select one street and then select an intersection street and click the magnifying glass.
  2. Then click the checkbox next to Traffic Signals.
  3. Click on a green dot (with number label) to find direction counts and the count date.

Okay, now let’s measure the street width.

Google Earth and Maps have this tool. For Google Earth, it’s as simple as finding the ruler tool in the toolbar, selecting your units, and then clicking on the start and end points. The distance will also be displayed live as you move your cursor.

Finding the distance in Google Maps has a few more steps:

  1. Turn on the measurement tool, in Maps Labs. Go to Google Maps and click “Maps Labs” at the bottom of the left pane.
  2. In the popup dialog pane, click the radio button next to “Enable” for Distance Measurement Tool.
  3. Click Save Changes.
  4. Find the street you want to measure.
  5. Click the ruler button in the lower left corner of the map.
  6. Click one side of the street and then click the other side of the street. You can keep clicking to get distances of a polyline (a multi-segmented line) that you draw.
  7. Change the map units to your desire (there are tens of archaic ones available).

Now you’ve got two more tools with which to arm yourself in understanding your streets and your neighborhood.