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Santa Fe Bike Paths & Trails

A WPI-inspired Trail Map of Santa Fe

Public Project active 2 months ago ago
Santa Fe Bike Paths & Trails has been a project for 1 year ago with 10 supporters with no discussions and no posts

This app shows all the bike lanes and recommended bike routes within Santa Fe. It also shows the Rail Trail and all the bike paths in Eldorado. In addition, it shows all of the Dorothy Stewart Trail, virtually all of the Dale Ball Trails, about half of the Atalaya Trails, and most of the Galisteo Basin Preserve Trails. It also shows what I call the ‘Power Line Trail,’ which goes under the power lines between Eldorado and Santa Fe.

I have classified the bike paths and trails according to a 4-tier system. For intra-city bike paths, I have used Google’s own classification system: dotted green lines for recommended routes and solid green lines for bike-only paths. For off-road trails, I have used solid yellow lines for trails of medium difficulty, and solid red lines for high-difficulty trails, trails which are best left to hikers and extremely strong mountain-bike riders. However, ‘My Places’ can be a little buggy and sometimes changes the colors of the lines inadvertently. I also used specific icons for each place, but Google resets them to its generic marker. Hopefully Google will fix these bugs soon.

I used Google’s map of the Rail Trail. For Eldorado, I was able to use Google’s ‘My Places’ to to map all the bike lanes there. For the off-road trails, I used Google’s Android-only app ‘My Tracks’ on my phone to lay down GPS coordinates of the trails as I hiked or biked them. Because the GPS is only accurate within 35 feet or so, where necessary and possible I am in the process of amending what tracks I can see in full-zoom satellite mode.

I’ve left out bike shops because users can just type “bike shop” into the search function on the map to find all the local bike shops. In fact, users can find almost anything within this app, because it has all the features of Google Maps, along with all of Google’s other functions. They can go anywhere on Google and search for any information, images, etc, all within this app. In fact, through the links on Google, they could go to any website. They could even check their email. They could use Google’s “Buzz” feature to add comments about local places, especially about the trail they might be on at the time. They can do all of this within this app.

Because it is useful to know how the weather is going to be for the duration of your hike or bike ride, I have added a ‘Weather’ screen to this app that will tell you the hourly weather for the Santa Fe area for the next 12 hours.

I adopted the WPI team’s idea of being able to email Santa Fe Parks and Recreation about a problem on the trail from within the app. The cool thing is, if you send the email from the problem site, the app will automatically record and relay the exact GPS coordinates of the problem to Santa Fe Parks and Recreation.

Another cool thing is, users can add their own maps as layers within this map. They just have go open up ‘My Places’ within this app, and add their own map as a layer of this map.

PLANS FOR ‘SANTA FE BIKE PATHS & TRAILS’ 2.0
Right now, through Google’s ‘My Location’ feature, you can press a button to find out where you are on this map. However, because that feature is in beta, it only works intermittently. Once it is out of beta mode, you’ll be able to reliably find out where you are on the map, and that will add a lot of value to this app.

For 2.0, I will finish modifying the tracks where necessary and possible to what I can see in full-zoom mode. I will also finish adding all the elevations to trailheads and mountain peaks.

I want users to be able to lay down their own tracks within this app. You can do that now using Google’s ‘My Tracks’ app, but it is for Android-only. I would like users to be able to do that within iOS, on this app. In the 2.0 version of this app, users will be able to add their own tracks, and keep statistics on where they have gone, how far they’ve gone, how high they’ve climbed, and how fast they’ve gone. Of course, if they wanted to, they could also share all this with the community of hikers and bike riders in Santa Fe. It would be a great way to meet more of that community, and to plan hikes and bike rides together. Users could make themselves visible on the map to other members of the community, and could thereby meet up on the trails.

All of this adds up to more fun and more community for the hikers and bike riders of Santa Fe.