Google Maps Improvement Requests

For creating and presenting bikeway infrastructure proposals

In Self-Organizing Bikeway Planning, I described a mechanism for capturing bikeway “connection proposals” in a way that would use crowdsourcing to collect and prioritize suggestions, after which a “map scraping” tool could be used to present the data.

I set out to emulate that kind of system using Google “My Maps” for input, and a Google Doc as sample output. Those efforts point to the kind of thing we need to create planning maps and to collect suggestions. The process surfaced a number of areas where the mapping tool could be improved.

Thumbnail of a preliminary bikeway-connections map

Requests

Here are the requests I made:

1. Add a help/feedback option when viewing a map.
   If it exists, I have yet to find it. The only place it can be done is from the dashboard. You can add a screenshot when you create a feedback note, but a screenshot from the dashboard isn’t very helpful.
2. Allow INCLUSION and REMOVAL of existing markers from Google maps for landmarks & orientation. (One base map has all of them, which is pretty distracting. The others have none. So I’m forced to manually re-add every significant landmark in a map I create.)
3. Allow circles, boxes, & ovals.
   I want to put a circle…