[bike] Touring the commuter rail system

[dmaze]

Wound up biking alone yesterday, after a three-week break. I didn't feel like doing a lot of planning, but the bike map suggests that it's possible to bike happily outside of 128 from Braintree to Waltham, so I headed out through Brookline with an eye for getting to the Blue Hills, maybe aiming for 50ish miles with some hills thrown in.

It's worth noting that the greater Jamaica Pond area is hillier than one might think from just driving around there. Also, that one should get their directions straight if they're trying to avoid the Arborway/Centre St intersection.

Left to my own, I made it 47 miles, going via Readville, out on 138 without doing anything particularly interesting in the Blue Hills, then clockwise back to Needham, at which point I headed back inbound, picking up 16 in Needham. I wound up taking a reasonably detailed tour of every commuter rail stop I passed, except for Norwood Center. I must have worn myself out early, along with being somewhat out of shape, since (especially right after lunch in Canton) I was trying hard to judge where exactly I should turn back and deciding if I really did have 10-15 miles left. If I wasn't right between trains I probably would have punted at Needham Junction.

Route map (since it's GPS now, you get to see all of the train-oriented noodling around); pictures (all of train stuff).

Comments

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

What was your plan to avoid the Arborway/Centre St intersection?

(Someday I will be spiffy enough to bike to my parents' house in Dedham.)

[dmaze]

From the intersection of Goddard Ave. and Newton St. in Brookline, turn right on Newton, left on Grove St., continue on Grove past West Roxbury Parkway, left on Russett Rd., cross VFW Parkway, left on Weld St., right on West Roxbury Parkway; this avoids both the Arborway/Centre St. intersection and the VFW/WRP rotary. Instead I turned left on Newton, effectively taking a long and hilly orbit of Jamaica Pond. But Centre St. south of the Arborway is in fact surprisingly bikable; the pink indication on the bike map is pretty accurate.

[iabervon.livejournal.com]

Does your GPS timestamp the data? It would be neat if you're out with a camera and a GPS to link the place you were when you took each picture to the picture and vice versa.

[dmaze]

It does; you can see this in the GPX files if you actually go poking around in my home directory. I hear there are ways of tagging JPEGs and tagging things in flickr with their geographic location, and I suppose a low-tech way of acquiring that is matching up the photo timestamp with the GPX file.

Also on my list is putting photos into the metadata for the bike trip stuff. Actually, in true Web 2.0 Mashup (TM) style, probably the right way is to make up flickr tags -- maybe even matching the trip URL tag -- and then do some kind of AJAX query, which hands back the URL and other tags, some of which are the appropriate geo tags. This is even eminently doable, provided I can figure out the flickr query goo.

[iabervon.livejournal.com]

Actually, it would probably be pretty easy to make kml files (for Google Earth) from your routes, with links to the pictures. I think Google Earth actually deals a lot better with paths with a lot of vertices than Google Maps, anyway.

[dmaze]

Yeah, that should be a simple matter of XSLT. There's a fair bit of JavaScript hacking (including some still to be done!) to make Google Maps run efficiently on these routes; I could believe Google Earth does a better job, it just doesn't run well in my usual computing environment.