The Google Maps of the Week

NYC.gov are using Street View to provide citizens with a unique new way to report local problems and to gather public feedback along Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn.

What needs improving on Fourth Ave in Bay Ridge? allows users to explore Fourth Ave on Google Maps Street View and add a comment directly to the image of where they think problems exist or where they believe the city could make improvements. The comments added to the application so far include problems with street lighting, double parking, problems with crosswalks, wrongly positioned speed-bumps etc.

The Street View interface is a working example of OpenPlan's Fitzgerald application. Using Fitzgerald, people can annotate Street View imagery to provide detailed, highly-specific comments about places. Administrators can then review comments and at the same time see exactly what the person was looking at when they left a comment.

Vasile Cotovanu has used his popular vehicle-simulator library to create a real-time simulation of the Grenoble public transport system.

The TAG Grenoble Network Simulator is a real-time simulation of the trams and buses of Grenoble based on the published timetables. The Google Map shows all the trams and buses in the city moving in real-time along their designated routes. The map uses the Stamen watercolor map tiles.


The directions service in Google Maps allows you to get driving, walking, cycling and public transit directions for any journey. However it doesn't allow you to compare all four modes of transport side-by-side.

Side-bySide Router does show all four routes on one Google Map, so that you can tell at a glance which is your best option. Above the map you can view the distance and the time taken for each mode of transport. It is therefore a a pretty handy guide to whether a journey is easy to walk or would be better by bike or that it looks like it might be worth taking the car or public transit.