Google’s ‘Bike There’: The dark side

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Google’s new “Bike There” feature, which entered beta (test) phase yesterday, must have already created an entire new ozone layer in the blogosphere. By mid-day yesterday, it was a lead story on radio and TV news, it was ballooning blog comment queues and it had been tweeted nearly into oblivion, becoming a top trending topic in bike-populous zones.

While we love the fact Google has added the feature, and generally — despite numerous flaws we found in just a cursory test — think it’s a valuable addition to Google’s route-finding family, we nevertheless have to step back from the crescendo of hype and ask ourselves if Bike There is really worth all the clamor.

With a day of judicious perspective under our belt, we found ourselves mulling over the Dark Side of Bike There.

The first thought that occurred to us, surfing around the service was: They spent how long on this? (One report had five months; the concept has been out there for several years and gained more than 50,000 signatures on an online petition.) Google is to be congratulated for the breadth and depth of its undertaking here, but Google Maps already had a pretty exhaustive database for Bike There to work off of. It can’t have been that difficult to get a bunch of bike maps and start plugging in the new fields.

What do they do over at the Googleplex all day long? Maybe the company should be renamed Doodle. We’ve always thought btw that Googleplex sounded pretty much like a techie term for preschool — maybe the thing Googlies send their kids to. There’s really something precious about the whole thing. Google is a successful company, no denying it. But if Bike There represents anything close to a serious commitment of resources, Google is coasting.

Or if they’re not coasting, they really don’t know what they’re doing.

As feedback from the bloggers and tweeters and in-yo-facebookers came cascading in through the day, a plethora of ineptitude began to accumulate. Bikes routed onto bridges with no sidewalks. Bikes routed onto busy death traps. Bikes routed up stairways. Commuter cyclists routed onto gravel roads.

I found a few myself in just a few minutes of cruising Bike There, although mine were more like quibbles over route preferences. Still, it occurred to me as I checked out some route recommendations over popular bike routes: Does anybody from the Bike There team actually ride?

According to a Seattle Times article, Bike There’s core team is based in Google’s Fremont district offices. So you might assume that they know Seattle. But Seattle-area commenters found numerous flaws in Bike There’s routing.

The most astounding one may have been putting a cyclist onto the West Seattle Bridge. You cannot be a bike rider in Seattle and be sentient at the same time and not know the beleaguered history of West Seattle bicycle commuting. Thankfully, the bottleneck was finally fixed after years of nightmarish routing. For Bike There not to know this, recognize the fix, and try to put cyclists on the decidedly bike-impossible West Seattle Bridge raises an obvious question: Didn’t anyone from the team test these routes?

Now I’m sure that the algorithms behind Bike There are fairly robust and accurate and get the job done 80 or 90 percent of the time. But no bot is a substitute for real-life experience and good old plain common sense. And that’s what you feel is lacking from Bike There.

To be fair, or at least less unfair, because we’re not quite done yet, Google is asking for user feedback on this beta. It’s counting on experienced cyclists to amend, correct, revise and otherwise improve upon Bike There’s technology.

Google acts like we should feel privileged to be so indentured. But here’s our take: First, why didn’t it ask experienced cyclists for input before it put out this thing to the general public? We’re not that hard to find — Seattle’s Cascade Bicycle Club has some 11,000 members.

Second, there’s something truly presumptuous about one of the world’s richest companies asking the public to do its work for it. Yes, Bike There is offered as a “free” service. And it is, as long as Google doesn’t ask for anything back. But any member of the public who provides valuable feedback that winds up being incorporated into Bike There isn’t really getting Bike There for free. He or she is working for Google … for free.

Google’s share price jumped more than $16 yesterday, presumably based in part on the Bike There announcement. Shareholders must get a warm and fuzzy feeling knowing that a huge new pool of non-paid workers has been added to the Google data-producing family.

We stand by our initial assessment that Bike There does a lot of good for urban cycling and is a definite keeper. But we’d like to see a lot more smarts in the system. From the looks of it, this is going to be a pretty dang long beta.

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5 thoughts on “Google’s ‘Bike There’: The dark side”

  1. As someone that is working extensively with both Portland and Seattle’s bicycle facility GIS data I would point out that most if not all of these irregularities are a result incomplete GIS data that the cities have. I completely agree that google should make an effort to “clean up” the data but from my perspective the cities are the ones that really need to lead that effort. In the end the cities are the ones that are and should be ultimately responsible for having good data for use both internally, for private companies or in my case research. If private companies do this it will be much harder to share as well as verify that it is accurate.

    I’m from Seattle and I have played around with the feature for Seattle and found problems but in general it is mostly correct. The places that I did find errors, I know were caused by lack or incorrect data because I have experienced the same problems in my project.

  2. Thanks Adam, helpful perspective. Not to belabor the point, but Google has far deeper pockets than most municipalities these days. To its credit, it’s doing as much for the (often dubious) concept of “public-private partnership” as it can on a number of fronts (including broadband & WAN as you know). Our new mayor is pretty savvy on connectivity issues; perhaps we’ll see a Google-City Hall alliance strengthening in coming months.

  3. You were thinking 5 months is a long time? That’s funny! I was guessing that Google probably spent years, not months on it! But I have no real knowledge from which to judge whether it should have been “easy” or “hard” to get it done. I assumed that it would take a long time to get all that data. However long it took– it doesn’t affect my experience of using Google Maps “bike there,” unless they didn’t spend ENOUGH time on it! 🙂

    Sure, would have been nice for every conceivable route to be ridden by a bicyclist– but that would take a very, very long time and cost quite a lot of money. Yes, I know, “deep pockets,” but it’s a business and cost vs. profit/benefit must be weighed. But hey, we got “Bike There” sooner, it IS in BETA form (which I think nullifies criticism anyhow, since this is not the finished product) and cyclists are typically eager to share information about where to ride (as opposed to drivers). I’ve seen so many blog posts now about “well.. Google sent me THIS way, but *I* ride my bike this way and blah blah” whatever.

    So.. I guess I just don’t have the qualms that you do! I know that it’s in Beta and I know that it’ll get better.

    Just a different view.

  4. Despite my quibbles with “Bike There”, I do appreciate that it’s been released.

    I am one of the West Seattle cyclists who would be shunted off onto the West Seattle Bridge to get downtown, if I didn’t know better (and didn’t see that bike path running under the W. Seattle Viaduct on GOOGLE’S OWN MAPS!) Eastbound routing from West Seattle is faulty on the maps (and yes, I’ve already relayed this to Google). If you are coming from Alki, it takes you off the path well before the West Seattle Viaduct and onto the road. If you manage to drag the route to the bike path, it will let you get as far as the Chelan Cafe, then it routes you back and onto the West Seattle Bridge to get to downtown, or through a maze of surface streets to get to the Duwamish Bikeway (instead of the reasonably well marked street crossings to continue the bike routes to either).

    Given Google’s history with releasing a product tagged as beta for seven years (hello, Gmail), I can’t really give them too much of a pass on the beta status. It’s more a way for the folks at the big G to keep monkeying with things with little ownership of the problems they may cause. How many times has a software company disclaimed responsibility for problems caused by beta software?

    I do appreciate the start, and look forward to seeing it improved. The quibble with the area around the West Seattle Viaduct aside, the route it gives me to work in Tukwila is very similar to what I’ve seen in several route books/sites/lists for the same trip. Not a bad start, all in all.

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