Bikes, Google Maps and Wisdom

When you work on a team that has 5+ professional cartographers, you don’t often get called on to make maps. But sometimes they’re busy, alas, and you use Google’s maps, which are actually pretty great these days. Today’s update of our bike map lets users submit short bits of bike wisdom anywhere in the world (though we’re focusing on North America).

The new maps use Canvas and were inplemented by the peerless Tom Giratikanon with a handy backend comment moderation tool from Marc Lavallee and our colleagues in Interactive News.

Tom spent a bit of time on the labeling algorithm before getting it right:

I know all the rage is about mobile devices these days, but I must say if you have a 40-inch monitor this looks pretty good in fullscreen mode really zoomed-in.