There is good news for Google Maps users like myself – those tired of its “Get Directions” feature being primarily designed for cars, making you respect one-way streets and incorporating speed limits into the calculations: Google has announced it will now offer walking directions . I discovered, for example, that apparently I spent 3 years taking a sub-optimal route to school:
Unfortunately for Ottawa, off-road pedestrian paths haven’t been incorporated into the dataset yet – so walking directions will ignore the entire NCC path system. Hopefully, they’ll be incorporated in the future. For those curious about the time estimates Google Maps serves up, apparently is 3 miles / 5.1km per hour – so adjust according to your own speed.
Cool,
Maybe once they add the NCC paths we can use it for a bike to.
Too funny. I was thinking about this very thing whilst mapping out a trip we did last evening that included a NCC bikepath. I was sad that my map was not 100% accurate.
http://www.cyclemania.ca/2008/08/cycling-thursday-evening-jaunt-ottawa/
Well, OpenStreetMap has some awesome data on paths and trails, but it’s a few years off from having a “directions” feature, unfortunately.
I noticed this a couple of days ago, actually. I like how it will cheerfully give you walking directions for even ridiculous distances. Ottawa to Toronto is, apparently, a pleasant 3 day, 8 hour walk. Overall though, definitely a nice feature, though it’ll be good when (with Google, “if” is out of the question) they integrate data on walking trails.
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