Google Maps API v3 now allows you to add the Bike route layer and traffic layer via the API, but there still isn’t an easy way to get at the transit layer.

To add the Bike layer:

To add the Traffic layer:

However, you can use the code below to add the Google Transit layer it as a custom tile layer. This will load the image tiles directly from Google’s servers:

This loads the full image types, so any other styles you’ve applied to the basemap will get covered up. Unlike Google Transit, the stations won’t be clickable and transit info won’t pop up unless you add your own markers to the map, but this should work ok for just showing transit routes.

You can see this technique live in our Realtime Transit Map project (also on github).

For those of you who haven’t tried bikesy, it lets you choose both a hill tolerance (how much you’d like to reroute to avoid San Francisco’s steep hills) and a safety level (how much you’d like to reroute to stay on bike routes and lanes). You can always visit Bikesy.com to find safe, fast bike routes around the San Francisco Bay Area but now you can add it as a Chrome App. This will do two things:

1. It will show up on your apps list when you open a new tab. This makes it fast and easy to launch Bikesy right before you set off on a bike trip to get route suggestions.

2. You’ll only need to approve geolocation once. Chrome apps allow you to grant access to bikesy.com to find your location based on browser geolocation once. The next time you return to bikesy.com and click “Map to my current location” it will just work.

Give it a try – add the Bikesy Chrome Application or just visit bikesy.com.

From everyone at BlinkTag, we wish the city of Solo in Indonesia a very Happy 266th Birthday!

Today, February 18, 2011, the city of Sukarta (colloquially Solo) is celebrating 266 years since its capital was built by Pakubuwono II on the banks of the Kali (River) Solo.

We’re very proud to have worked along with USAID / SERASI, UN HABITAT, and a bunch of amazing people in order to create Solo Kota Kita, an online resource for Solo’s 600,000+ residents. SKK provides tools to residents in Surakarta (Solo), Indonesia for the annual participatory budgeting process – known locally as musrenbang.

Here are three of our favorite things about SKK:

1. On the Neighborhoods page, there are 51 great portraits of people from all 51 neighborhoods of Solo. Click each one to go to the neighborhood’s page. To learn more about each individual who was photographed, click on each person’s photo on Flickr and read the description.

2. Each neighborhood has an interactive map. Show population density, medical facilities, and more by selecting options on the map. As shown below for Penumping, we displayed the distance to the nearest school and the location of each school.

3. Solo Kota Kita’s blog. Check here for posts from Ahmad Rifai, Olivia Stinson, Michael Haggerty, and Ian Pramoto on how Solo Kota Kita was conceived, how it came together, and how it’s doing now. While you’re there, please leave a comment! Whether it’s a simple “Happy Birthday” or something more in-depth, we’d love to hear from you.

Of course, that’s not all we like, but you’ll have to check out the whole website to see the rest.

• English: http://solokotakita.org/en/
• Bahasa: http://solokotakita.org/

If you’re already missing the celebration in Indonesia, make sure you don’t miss these sites as well!

• Solo Kota Kita on Facebook
• Solo Kota Kita on Flickr

A GTFS file is an open specification that allows a transit agencies schedule and route information to be used by developers in a variety of applications. One of the most popular applications that uses GTFS data is Google Map’s Transit Trip Planner. County Connection’s routes are now available on google maps website and on smartphones that have google maps available. Also, the transit data is now open for developers to incorporate into their apps. Examples of transit apps include Routesy, Bay Tripper and Anystop

See a sample trip on google transit: Walnut Creek, CA to Alamo, CA
Get raw GTFS file: CCCTA GTFS on GTFA Data Exchange

The Solo Kota Kita team just prepared a video in Bahasa with subtitles that gives a great overview of the project and why it is important.

The Solo Kota Kita project has been written about in Good Magazine and Design Observer.

Check out the site and interactive neighborhood-level maps at solokotakita.org.

However, there currently isn’t a way to get display the transit or bike map layer. However, Google Maps allows you to create your own tile layer and load in into the map. It’s not too difficult to create your own custom tile layer and actually refer to the actual bike map or transit map tiles and load them directly from Google.

The URL template you need for getting bike maps is:

http://mt1.google.com/vt/lyrs=m@121,bike&hl=en&x={X}&y={Y}&z={Z}

and for transit maps:

http://mt1.google.com/vt/lyrs=m@121,transit|vm:1&hl=en&opts=r&x={X}&y={Y}&z={Z}

To create your own tile layer, use one of the URL templates above:

function initialize() {
  var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map_canvas"));
  map.setCenter(new GLatLng(37.880002, -122.189941), 11);

  //Create new Tile Layer
  var gTileUrlTemplate = 'http://mt1.google.com/vt/lyrs=m@121,bike&hl=en&x={X}&y={Y}&z={Z}';
  var tileLayerOverlay = new GTileLayerOverlay(
    new GTileLayer(null, null, null, {
      tileUrlTemplate: gTileUrlTemplate,
      isPng:true,
      opacity:0.8
    })
  );
  map.addOverlay(tileLayerOverlay);
  }

These URLs could change at any time, so there is no guarantee that this won’t break. You can see this in action at whereisbart.com

So this might be kind of a gray area terms-of-service-wise, so do what you want with it. But if you’ve ever wondered how to mashup the Google Transit layer with your custom map, here’s how.

While we aren’t advocating anybody actually do this, we’ve heard from a *confidential* source that Google implements new feature requests in rough proportion to the number of people who hack together stuff like this. Just saying . . . .

SF Cityscape has lots of other neat maps including one of existing and proposed streetcar lines in New Orleans.Technorati Tags: maps, transit, bart, san francisco, new orleans

You’d think it would be easy to change the stacking order of things you overlay in Google Maps, right? Like, no one wants that stupid AC Transit logo to go underneath the polygon they drew . . . . . you’d think . . . .

Anyways, after like five or six hours of poking around on forums I found a solution.

First, it turns out that overlays on Google Maps have both a ZIndex and a “GPane” associated with them. If you change the ZIndex, you change the order in which objects on the same pane are displayed. Turns out that polygons and ground overlays (like the AC Transit image) are automatically added to the same pane, so no help there.

Here’s the magic. Google lets you create custom overlay classes, where you can specify GPanes for individual images or whatever. But it looks really hard, and I’m lazy.

So I stole this js class that does basically what I want. Just replace the following snippit of code

map.getPane(1).appendChild(div);

with this one

map.getPane(Some higher number, like 7).appendChild(div);

and you’re good to go.

To our loyal blog readers – this isn’t quite ready for production, but I wanted to explore BART’s new open data feed and do something fun.

Comments, thoughts, appreciated. A few known issues:

We’re still working on getting the real time feed up. Soon.

The design isn’t great. We’ll be rolling out new ways to visualize the data soon, and include an extra layer showing stations.

Not sure if this group’s efforts well ever bear fruit, but it would be sweet to hop into a lagoon on a scorcher like today. Or maybe I can just sit on the roof and drink beer instead.

Even though it’s sort of Web 1.0, I’m glad someone is collecting these data. The New York maps are kind of boring, really, and more or less confirm what most people already know: there’s a lot going on there, all over, all the time. LA is more interesting, and because event venues are more spread out you can get a better feel for what’s going on given the scale of the graphics.

Better yet would be to scrape data from yelp or eventful or whatever and show this stuff real time. Is it really worth paying some professor a full year’s salary to do this?

You know what makes me mad? Lousy design.

Take the Atlantic’s latest missive on how it’s unfair to incarcerate like half of the population of the City of New Orleans. Important issue, no doubt, and maybe it’s just me, but hiring a new graphic designer might make a bit more sympathetic to the cause. Without cheating, see if you can make sense of this map. Don’t throw stones if you live in a glass house and all that, but screw it, I need to rant once in awhile.

• Spatial data should almost always be normalized by population. As the article points out, this makes the info for the Ninth Ward look janky. So fix it. Not that hard.
• If you don’t have anything to say, don’t say it, even if you get to use a neat looking graphic. Look at the little person icon in each block. Now count how many blocks have more than one. Not helpful. Like pie charts. Or bar charts with two data points.
• You can’t read the legend. Or a good portion of the data labels. Again, easy to fix.
• The other images on the site are low-res. Actually, I’m kind of impressed – normally people upload images that are way too big. But really, don’t flaunt if if you just don’t got it.
• The callout on the right doesn’t help anyone understand the map’s spatial context. How many people out there know that Central City is shaped kind of like a slice of pizza? How many people care? Show of hands?

Seriously, though, it’s kind of an interesting article. Read it. Oh, and thanks to Dug for finding this for me.

Paris

New York

London

San Francisco BART

See many more at Fakeisthenewreal.com.

I’m not really sure what that line is heading down Market St diagonally in the western section of the BART map, but either way it appears to be larger than all of the others. I wonder what all of these maps would look like if you included commuter rail lines as well.

Thanks to the Transportationist for pointing these out.