have reason to smile.]
Lauren Donohue and Wyatt Baldwin of byCycle.org just released a very cool feature of their Trip Planner that lets webmasters and bloggers copy/paste a bit of HTML code into any website to give visitors street-by-street, bicycle-friendly directions.
It’s just like Mapquest or Google Maps…for bikes!
You can give this a try over in my sidebar right now. Or, if you’re a webmaster or blogger, here’s the page with the code you’ll need to put it on your own site.
Another very cool feature for businesses is that you can easily pre-program the destination address to offer customized, bike-friendly route information to your shop!
Online bicycle route planning is a very hot topic in advocacy circles. I attended a workshop about it at the recent National Bike Summit in DC and I saw Congressman Peter DeFazio checking out byCycle’s Trip Planner at the Bicycle Tourism Summit in Eugene a few weeks ago.
Lauren and Wyatt’s innovative work could have a huge impact on bike use across the country and it’s very exciting to have them based here in Portland.
The next step for this dynamic duo is to secure funding to host and expand the service and continue to make it better. They’ve been working very closely with Metro and they recently signed a contract with the Bike Federation of Wisconsin to offer route-finding for the Milwaukee area. They’re also working with Pittsburgh to get that area’s bike routes online as well.
Stay tuned for more great things from Lauren and Wyatt, and if you have feedback I’m sure they’d love to hear it.