To go with the comparison mentioned in the article though, Apple maps doesn’t even have an option to cycle at the moment. I never use it in London for just that reason. They’ve decided that it’s more important to add ride sharing as an option before cycling in what I can only assume is a product of their being in suburban America.
>> is a product of their being in suburban America.
Close, but imho is has more to do with liability, a fear common at all american companies. Car drivers are licensed. They can be expected to obey traffic laws. So when google sends them down the wrong way on a one-way road, nobody blames google. They blame the adult who listened to their phone rather than the signs. But bicyclists are not licensed. If google says that a road is open to cyclists when it isn't, and something bad happens, few will blame the 12yo unlicensed cyclist just following their phone's directions. This is why google, imho, seems to be limiting bicycle routes to those areas with the most clearly defined paths, preferably separate from roads.
And the one-way thing for bike routes is likely based on the widespread understanding that bicycles on roads must obey all the rules that cars do. Going the wrong way on a one-way road is illegal in many areas no matter what vehicle you use. This may never be enforced, but google's legal team probably isn't willing to depart from the letter of the law.
I cycle in a mid-cized American city that has had a "Bicycle Friendly America" Silver ranking for several years now, and the Google Maps bicycle directions have been extremely iffy since they were introduced. I just checked how Google Maps routes my normal cycle route home, and it's very close to good, but in fact is quite bad.
It routes me onto a dangerous arterial road rather than the pleasant multiuse park path that is directly adjacent to the arterial road (and which is my normal cycling route). The Google Maps recommendation here is quite bad and possibly dangerous. The alternate route goes on another heavily-trafficked road rather than the quiet surburban street a block away that is a designated cycle route marked with bicycle signs and sharrows (which was my previous cycling route).
And the presence of those only adds to my point. Where bike lanes are not specifically states as being 2-way, the default for someone like google is to treat them according to the rules of the road they run alongside.
The point is that in the Netherlands there is a huge number of streets that are specifically signed as "one way, except for bicycles", it's a core feature of our urban infrastructure. Google treats them all as one way for everybody, in a country where over a quarter of all journeys is made by bicycle.
> They’ve decided that it’s more important to add ride sharing as an option before cycling in what I can only assume is a product of their being in suburban America.
Maybe bike shares? I wish the cycle directions had an option if you have a bike or not and if not it will determine where the closest spots to get a bike share and go from there as opposed to walking/bus to the destination.
Cycling is a relatively new feature even on Google maps. I believe it appeared about three years ago?
While Apple is still playing catch-up, it appears to me that cycling, and all other features mentioned in the article, are exceptionally ameliorable to machine learning, and its advances over the last few years.
Apple being the only other company in the world with access to the wealth of position data on users' phones, and the financial muscle to purchase any satellite images they want to get their hands on, shouldn't have too much of a difficulty of replicating these.
It might have differed by region. I went on a bike trip from Denmark to Greece in 2010 and remember doing all sorts of GIS to get good mapping data.
I seem to remember discovering Google's bike directions, including the height profiles, a few months later and being slightly miffed that it wasn't available for my trip.
A lot easier said than done. Plus not even sure if Apple cares to catch up. But Google is also running so fast and now putting SDC on the road collecting more data it is hard to see Apple ever catching up.
