Google has taken the wraps off a new beta feature on Google Maps:  bike route support.  The feature was turned on as the National Bike Summit in Washington, D. C. got underway this week.  Google has added the bike route system to the maps of 150 cities thus far, and Fort Worth is one of them.

In Google Maps, you can use the “More” button at the upper right of the map to turn on the new “Bicycling” layer.  As seen in the screenshot above, this adds green routes for bike route streets, such as these in the Near Southside.

Off-street trails are also highlighted in green.

You can also get bicycling directions.  Here, we gave it a simple test – in the Near Southside, from Magnolia & Henderson to Pennsylvania & Jennings.  Google Maps correctly used the bike lanes on Magnolia and the sharrow route on Jennings to take us there – Jennings is the main north-south bike route for the Near Southside between Magnolia and Downtown.

As long as there’s a bike route connection between your start and end, Google Maps seems to work pretty well.  Where it starts to fall apart is when there’s gaps in the bike route system – and we certainly have plenty of those in Fort Worth.  If there’s not a direct bike route connection, Google Maps starts to get a little weird.  Here, it told us to go straight down Henderson from Magnolia to get to Sundance Square – not the route we’d recommend or ride ourselves.  Henderson is not a bike-friendly street.  We’d take Magnolia down to Jennings into Downtown, meet up with Throckmorton next to the Omni Hotel, then take the bus lane on Throckmorton to 3rd.  Oddly, though Jennings is marked as a bike route all the way to Downtown, Google ignores it in this case.  Google warns that these directions are in beta, and provides a link in the yellow box on the left to submit your own suggestions or corrections.

Here’s the route Google gives for Magnolia & Henderson to 7th & Currie.  Not sure we’d recommend riding on the Summit Avenue freeway overpass for most riders.

Using one of Google’s suggested alternate routes, another problem with the current beta system becomes apparent:  not only does it not yet know what streets are good for bikes and what streets are bad (see how it recommends riding down not only University but also the Rosedale freeway-style overpass over the river), it also doesn’t seem to recognize all the access points for the Trinity Trails.

To test that last point, we tried a custom route by dragging & dropping the blue line.  We attempted to join the Trinity Trails near the Fort Worth Zoo/Rogers Road area to ride up towards the West 7th development via the trails into the park, but Google instead appeared to route us up University, into Trinity Park, onto the trails, then all the way out the opposite direction to Hulen before bringing us back down the trails into Trinity Park.

Clearly, Google’s not kidding about the “beta” part.  Of course, some of the bugginess of the current setup in Fort Worth is probably also due to our disjointed bike route plan.  In the future, as the Bike Fort Worth plan is implemented, Fort Worth will start to look a lot more like how the cities with more comprehensive bike transportation systems look in the new bike map feature, like Portland and Austin:

Beyond our own incomplete bike route network, the new Google Maps feature needs to start learning which streets are good and bad for bikes.  Undoubtedly, feedback from users will be key to making that work – so Fort Worth bicycle users, start reporting to Google when they get things wrong.  It might not be a bad idea for Google to implement some kind of street grading system to gauge a street’s bike friendliness based on a rider preference – something like an “Easy, Medium, Difficult” scale.  And of course, to create streets that are friendly to bikes in general, it’s important for cities to implement Complete Streets policies.

It’s still a big step forward to have Google implementing bike routing into Google Maps, so we’re excited about the possibilities as this feature matures.  Use it and see how it works for you.