Thursday, May 3, 2007

Google Map of Boulder Bike Paths

One of the first projects I want to work on is a Google Map of all the Bike Facilities in the city of Boulder, Colorado, USA. I could also use your help (please see below).


It would initially be based off the map found here (8MB PDF here).

The final output would be a KML file that can be viewed in a number of different ways.

The advantage of this is that you can then use tools like Google Maps or Google Earth to view the bike path network together with your Google searches. For example, you likely know how to search for the South Side Walnut Cafe. Using the Google Maps tool you can also find directions about how to get there on the road network. But if you are not familiar with the bike paths in that area and you want to take your family there with your bikes, then would it not be nice to have an overlaid map showing how to get to the cafe via the bike paths.

In that case, you would first select the Boulder Bike Paths Google Map page and when prompted, search for "South Side Walnut Cafe". Now your results will be overlaid with the Boulder Bike Path map. Pretty neat, eh?

You could also install Google Earth on your desktop and download the corresponding Boulder Bike Paths KML file for you to use with Google Earth.

I need your help
If you have time to digitize additional Boulder Bike Paths into KML format, you could do that and then send me the KML file. I will keep a composite of all the KML files and try to arrange them by groups (bike path name/type). It might also be interesting to have bike path points of interest included on separate layers.

Tools that I used to create KML files:
  • maps.google.com and then create new "My Maps"
  • Google Earth to compile the KML layers
You can contact me at

alfred [dot] sawatzky [at] gmail [dot] com

if you have questions or want to contribute.

1 comment:

Alfred Sawatzky said...

For some reason I cannot edit my initial post. What I wanted to say was... if you need to download the actual KML file for use by Google Earth, you can get it here.