[Bike] Twice the T tokens, twice the fun!

There was this brilliant idea that we'd have an semi-organized 60ish-mile ride yesterday. "We" turned out to be only three people. But we left Davis, and headed to Mem. Drive to the BU Bridge. Where a brilliant cyclist shot out from a building and across the path, causing everyone he cut off to stop suddenly. My rear wheel wasn't on the pavement somehow, lost control, didn't unclip, left leg sad. Stopped by ET to attempt to address this, but really, I was functional, so we kept going.

More thrilling urban riding brought us to the Southwest Corridor park. Personally, I was underwhelmed, but we made it all the way to the Arborway T stop, uh, that's Forest Hills, yeah. Backtracked into JP for lunch, wandered through Franklin Park, then the Forest Hills Cemetery on the way to Mattapan Square. (Nice cemetery, incidentally; it felt much more...intimate? than the vast suburban cemeteries I've experienced before.) Rode all the way down Blue Hill Ave., into the Blue Hills Reservation, and over Chickatawbut Hill. (Always reassuring that you can climb the hills that people who passed you earlier have to walk up.) We crossed 128, headed back west...and ran into horrible tire issues and aborted to the Braintree T stop. This wound up being only 35 miles in all, but with the heat and humidity (one of those electronic-light signs that banks tend to have, though this one wasn't on a bank, said 97 degrees in JP) it was still a pretty good ride. (route)

Rant the first: HEY YOU! YEAH YOU THERE, ON THE BIKE! Get a helmet! Ride on the right side of the street! Raise your seat! Inflate your tires! Don't ride at night without lights!

( Rant the second )

Google Maps + Biking

Combining the publicly available information about Google Maps, a copy of the Census Bureau's TIGER database imported into PostgreSQL, some Python hacking, and general navigational memory, I now have bike trips projected on to Google Maps.

The big problem right now is TIGER's view of the world being slightly different from Google's; if you zoom in a lot, you can see the points not lining up. Also, look at the bridge between Salem and Beverly in the Rockport trip, which follows TIGER's reality and not Google's. (I also found one bug in TIGER/Line 2003, which I should figure out how to report.) There are also limits (in some cases the Google Maps JavaScript hangs, I'm not sure when but trimming out points seems to help), and a report that this doesn't work under IE.