It’s time for the 22nd annual Old Bike Swap Meet and Show this Sunday down at the Kent National Guard Armory. A great show if you can make it for the simple reason that you always see something you’ve never seen before, even when (like at my age) you think you’ve seen it all.

It’s still snowing up at Whistler, which will amaze all the snowless Olympics attendees out there, but the official Mountain Bike Park opening is just a month and a half away. Lots going on up north as well: A new Web site, new races, and a fleet of new Maxxis Minion DH tires. More at PinkBike.

Gertrude Stein said, “There is no there there.” Cyclists are saying, “There is no Bike There.”

Drat it all, Andy Schleck’s knee just ain’t coming around. Guess it won’t be his big year for the Tour after all.

BonesOverMetal has results from Double Down Hoe Down on Beacon Hill in Spokane, one of WA’s unheralded gems.

When we hear officials float a very small, quite tiny really, excise tax, we think of the Monty Python’s Holy Grail witch scene, where very small rocks are said to float.

The Association of Pedestrian and BIcycle Professionals is urging women and girls to fill out this survey/

Bicycle Retailer’s report from Taipei: “Andrea Wu, press coordinator for Taipei Cycle organizer TAITRA, said early numbers indicate the show has been well attended with a 9.3 percent increase in international visitors on the first day and a 7 percent increase on day two. The number of foreign journalists covering the show has increased as well, Wu said.”

Tribute to Phil Wood; memorial service set for Los Gatos on April 17.

There’s nothing quite like the Bend Big Fat Tour, for which registration just opened.

The full video of the California premiere of “Women of Dirt” last month in Santa Cruz is out…my favorite part being the panel discussion.

The Top 10 facts from America Bikes and other goodies from Transportation for America are available.

An uncharacteristically grumpy Fat Cyclist deconstructs the Lance Armstrong appearance on Tony Kornheiser’s show (our take).

Sylvia Paull’s lyrical encounter with Google Maps’ new “Bike There” feature, more or less reiterating our call for some kind of context re Google’s recommendations (“hilly, less hilly, flat”, etc.). Also, it appears from numerous real-life tests that the much ballyhooed algorithmic weighting of Bike There for hills just plain ain’t working… Like we said earlier, this could be one of the longest betas in software history.

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.

Other commentaries

New York Times

Biking Bis

Cyclelicious

The wait, it turns out, was worth it. Although Google is with typical lowered expectations calling it a beta, it’s in pretty good shape. Yes there are flaws: After an hour of playing around with it, we found a few routes to quibble over. But all in all “Bike There” recommendations were solid.

Nastiness Circumvented: From Green Lake to the top of Queen Anne

Google fixes that and does it well. Bike lanes and bike paths seem superbly leveraged in the cities I looked at, largely in the Seattle and San Francisco Bay areas. I even found a couple of underpass and overpass options I did not know about.

One suggestion for the Googlies would be to include a “Hills” feature: Something along the lines of “Hilly,” “Less Hilly,” “Flat.” Or whatever. The reason: In most cities there are ride-arounds for killer hills that aren’t really intuitive looking at a map, or even at an elevation profile. You just have to get on the bike and ride ‘em to figure out the best route.

That’s where I managed to flummox “Bike There.” In one route, from Lyon Street to Geary in San Francisco, “Bike There” completely missed the best route through the Presidio. Not sure why, but it may have to do with the bike-lanes bias. The best route lacks lanes but is less hilly (elevation is more gradual) and shorter.

In Seattle, a route from University Village to my home at Green Lake gave the most direct route. And it’s the one I usually take. But that’s only because I don’t mind hills. The easier, more scenic, less trafficky and more bike specific (a lot of Burke-Gilman Trail) route is a bit longer. But many hill-averse cyclists would prefer it, especially ones using Google Maps as a first-time-there helpmate.

In the case of getting from home to Queen Anne Ave. N., a nasty hill from any direction, Google gave a “least painful” option up 3rd Ave. N. from Nickerson. But this time it chose the more circuitous route. To be fair, the way I take is for an experienced cyclist — down Aurora, across the bridge and turn right at the south end of the bridge for a short ride to Queen Anne Ave. You can also ride up Dexter on its bike path from Fremont and cut under the Aurora Bridge, but that’s also a bit more challenging (albeit shorter).

You get the drift here. If you’re bike savvy, you probably will use “Bike There” largely as a second opinion — unless you haven’t been to your destination before or are generally unfamiliar with the layout of a place.

But for the general public, “Bike There” is a terrific service and huge step forward in encouraging folks to get out ‘n ride. The Google announcement made the point that “Bike There” helps persuade the public that bikes belong on any street or thoroughfare, and deserve to be included in any directional matrix.

Undoubtedly similar applications are destined for the iPhone and wireless devices for on-the-fly GPS. But Google has definitely done its homework. We’ll be pounding on “Bike There” more in coming weeks and do a followup report. But we doubt we’ll find much to complain about.

BikeHugger takes a look at Bike There’s reach.