Google Maps just started claiming to be able to help bicyclists.

So I tried it, and input my starting point and destination. FAIL!

Oh, it generated a route all right. But they have a long way to go.

First, they start off by routing me up a significant hill and back down to one of the worst east-west streets. By contrast, my route goes through a neighborhood and gets onto a long sloping down hill on a better street.

From here, it gets the right route for a brief while then routes me through an industrial park where there are alot of trucks and comes back out onto my route. Soon we part again as I cut down a side street that allows me easement onto the MUP through the park, and then a ride through a suburban development with minimal traffic. Google says to take the main street and guides me along a section of highway with heavy traffic, heavily potholed narrow lanes, no shoulders and no sidewalks. I consider it a death zone.

As I come out of the development, the nature of the street changes and it now has 8 foot wide shoulders and is smooth and rolling. Google gets this right and for the rest of the ride does manage to find the correct route. Even the short cut via the freeway on-ramp that also goes to the frontage road that my employer is on.

It says that the trip should take 59 minutes which is just a few minutes longer than it does.

For the return trip, Google does not know about the shortcut through the back of the hotel parking lot across a strip of grass to the State Police parking lot. This is important because the frontage road is a one way street. So Google takes me up the one way street heading away from the correct direction, and then takes me through some residential neighborhoods. I take the shortcut and avoid the extra riding and then go back up the way I came. But after a while we meet and Google is back on track.

We part ways when we get back to the suburban development. They take me back through the death zone and back through the industrial park. But the important thing here is that that short dog leg requires taking a left turn across traffic and then crossing traffic again to get back onto the same road we just left. I just go with the flow of the road, much safer.

Now I have to mention that at the suburban development, when it's light, I take a long cut through the park on the far side of the development and enjoy the traffic free riding and connect to the MUP. But Google can't be faulted for that.

What I can take objection to is how they route me down that bad east-west street and then into a suburban neighborhood that I ride when I want to practice my hill climbing, because it's one hill after another.

So it might help as a planning tool, just to see what it suggests, as sometimes it does go through residential neighborhoods instead of main streets, but their database still leaves an awful lot to be desired when it comes to plotting routes as a bicyclist would. To their credit, there is a prominent link where you can report discrepancies, and shortcuts.