Wow, that’s great – good work. Thanks for bringing it full circle. I just left a comment there explaining the project as best I understand it so far.

http://thestar.blogs.com/maps/2010/03/a-roundup-of-maps-elsewhere.html

To this end I’ve created a Blog here in BikingToronto. My first post is a reprint from my blog: ‘Toronto Bicycling Route Mapping Wiki Project”. It explains how the Data Base of bike routes I’ve already created can be accessed and how YOU can make your own map and shortly, have it included in a Bicycle Route Map blog page here in Biking Toronto and at my blog, Michael Holloway’s FilterBlogs.

Hope to see you there!

Biking Toronto Bicycle Route Map Wiki

West End Toronto to St Clair and Yonge

Tags: safe, efficient, commute, touring, recreation, bicycle, wiki, Biking, Toronto, route, map,

Click on map to view an interactive version at SportDistanceCalculator.com

————————

Michael Holloway

..more on the wiki project…

Joe asked, ‘Is there a way to get all the routes on one map?’

With the Sport Distance Calculator, No, as far as I can figure.

It seems limited in several ways:

1) It doesn’t seem to have a search-able database, I had to use the RSS feature to retrieve my creations. The RSS feed lists only the last 15 addresses, at publishing time, 12 more posts and mine will be lost forever at the site. Weird.

2) The developer is maintaining the site, they’ve installed a ‘post to Twitter’ application recently – which I found handy.

3) There’s is a tag feature but I haven’t figured out how/if it works.

4) Generally the parameters of the thing are narrowly defined; I think it was designed as a one-off tool for single athletes to calculate how far they ran/cycled that day.

I’m going to write to the author and see if I can suggest a collaboration to build a different use-purpose map application – with all the features the Sport Distance Calculator has, plus some features that will make it a more collaborative thing. A new visioning of the product. They might be totally enthusiastic, we’ll see.

If none of this works out there is still the the vision I outlined earlier:

- picture of the created map linked to the Sport Distance Calculator database, labeled with-in a well thought out meme..

As I said before, OpenStreetMap would be ideal for here but it is One Map of the entire planet. A user there has transfered all the existing, and planned Toronto bike routes onto it. On zoom the route lines are wider than the road itself. Other users have added routes – they appear in different colours. When you see all the info already on the Toronto portion of the map the whole thing seems like a great big mess. There is a lot of info is there I just don’t know how to unpack it and send it to the right place.

Is there anyone with map making experience who could lend a hand with this?

Michael Holloway

Yesterday I left a note here in SET BUG group, about OpenStreetMap.org – a perfect medium, I said, to create a user generated bicycle route map for the GTA.

After a day of study at Open Street Map I found it to be too complex for my coding abilities.

The good news is, I went back to an application I’ve used before the Sport Distance Calculator and it has all the elements I was imagining for this project – except importability.

With the Sport Distance Calculator you can create route maps and add a paragraph that describes the route. The map is then saved with the creator’s own password (to secure it). Each map has it’s own URL.

Below are the URL’s for the four maps I made today. I posted them to Twitter with the #BikeTO list tag and a short description with some keywords – safe, efficient, fast, and commute – that describe what kind of route they are.

http://www.sportdistancecalculator.com/?id=1086#map

http://www.sportdistancecalculator.com/?id=1085#map

http://www.sportdistancecalculator.com/?id=1084#map

http://www.sportdistancecalculator.com/?id=1083#map

Some Ideas to take this further

Biking Toronto users can create maps of their favourite ‘commute’ or ‘safe’, ‘recreation’ or ‘touring’ routes (to name a few keywords I’ve thought might make the data base accessible) and then post the URL’s here or in a specific list in Twitter.

I think I can create a list of images with links in them to the Sport Distance Calculator’s server.

Or using Bit.ly link customizers we can label the URL’s by keyword to help users search in a list – posting them on a separate page in Biking Toronto will give you a search-able database through Google et al. a well.

Michael Holloway