I thought this would be dead simple but trying to label a road as “bike-friendly” isn’t as intuitive as one would hope (am I “adding” a road even though it’s technically there or reporting “wrong info” piece by piece?)
As someone who uses open street maps for statistics/analysis to advocate better bike infrastructure; please contribute to open street maps not google.
You can easily do exactly what you were saying; open up an existing road, add an attribute to it saying
bike_friendly: true. Just login (on desktop), go to the part of the map you want to edit, click edit at the top and do the walkthrough. It should look like thisSide rant: The google maps API for analyzing data is so bad it might as well not exist. Even ignoring the painful signup process AUTH tokens, cost of usage, and crappy docs; it doesn’t provide access to basically any useful information about roads. Meanwhile open street maps is so easy you don’t even need an account; just run a browser command and scrape any data you want, including downloading the entire database.
I had a feeling this would be the answer. I use OpenStreetMap for projects at work as the API was way easier (and the price made it a much easier sell to management) but hadn’t used the mobile app until now but it’s quite impressive
Only reservation is a question of whether or not a satellite view is available to check for the presence of sidewalks when not marked
edit: found the Mapillary add-on and 360-only filter. Really can’t believe how extensive the coverage is. Sounds like there’s no need to settle any longer
I might be wrong with this, but I think Google Maps gets some of its data from OpenStreetMap. You might be better off updating the road there and seeing if it transfers over.
It would probably take a while to go through, but even if it doesn’t work, you will have added data to an open map that everyone can use :)
OSMAnd in particular is a nicer app for cycling anyway, and can be used completely offline (although it does take some time to adjust the interface).
For me, OSMAnd~ epitomizes FOSS: Can do literally everything, privacy friendly, completely offline, but incredibly ugly, and with a UX so horrible it keeps everyone but the idealists away.
I’ve been using the app for hiking for years and I still constantly find myself looking for the right menus or the back button behaving in unexpected ways. The search function is also basically unusable.