To bike from my suburb to the children's museum, one has two choices: brave the highway (uphill, narrow shoulder), or do a really long detour through calmer avenues. Well, today I found that there is in fact a somewhat hidden entrance gate to a nature preserve park, that is exactly behind the children's museum, and which lets me cut through the park.

The way through the park is a longer than the highway, and steeper, but SO MUCH MORE PLEASANT! I just hope they open that gate everyday - it does say that it has the same opening hours as the rest of the park.

Next project: see which gated communities one can use as shortcuts - most have gates closed to cars, but small openings for pedestrians.

I'm always on the lookout for short cuts for the various places I go with my bike. Sometimes they workout, and it's exactly as it is indicated on Google map. Sometimes, however, there's a gate that's not shown on the map or streetview, or some kind of impassable obstacle and I end up backtracking. It is a delight when it works out.

I was on a ride recently coming to a place where 2 streets do not connect on the map. Between them was dense hedge and shrubs, but with a small passage a few feet wide to get from one street to the other, with some brick pavers. That was nice!

I need to do a better job at looking for different routes to just change up things especially in the city. Guess I need to be more adventurous.

Great find!

Google maps and street view has totally changed my commuting.

Maps shows where streets butt up against each other, and then street view will show me if there is a pedestrian/bike connection, or a solid fence/wall.

I have dozens of cut-throughs that way. Where it looks like it should be public knowledge, I'll update the bike paths on google maps so that others can take advantage of my findings.

I didn't realize that this was possible. Are you talking about a route so others can search and find it, or do you mean that when I go to Google map it automatically shows your route? That would be cool, sort of like a wiki-map. I'm not so much up-to-date with these things on the interwebz.

If you know of a cut-through path that's suitable for cyclists you can submit the information to Google Maps and then it'll appear on everyone's maps when they select Bicycle as the transportation type for directions. I've done that for some connections to a local rails-to-trails MUP that didn't show up originally and where Google would route me on a much more roundabout way to get to the MUP. There are also some short path connections inside neighborhoods where the streets end in cul-de-sacs but a path of a hundred feet or so lets pedestrians and cyclists get through. If we all entered the ones we know about locally into Google Maps it would make these useful to more cyclists.

That's very cool! I guess I'd been using it on this website: How far did I run? - Create running maps with On The Go Map without realizing it. I thought, how do they know there was a cut-through on this seldom-used street? Now I know. Geez, I thought Google was sending their streetview vehicles. How silly.

High-resolution aerial imagery, better than satellite images - nearmap is another mapping site that allows you to get really close on the close up views. It's kind of scary how close you can get with that.