Week 5:1

When google maps first loaded satellite images of my home country, there were curious anomalies in the resolution of available satellite imagery.  In long strips of aeroplane flyover the resolution was what I will call normal where one could zoom in far enough to tell during which season the photos had been taken because the trees had flowers or green leaves or were darker.  But then there was the area around the fertiliser factories near the seaside – these were low resolution and zooming in I quickly ended up with green cotton wool.  This was, I presumed, because the factories had had a previous life, being used to manufacture explosives… for war but also for mining.  Then, if one followed the highway over the mountain pass there was a line where the resolution became much higher, more detailed and crisp – because this was where the apartheid government had built a secret underground rocket building factory.  The images are now mostly updated and the resolutions normalised but that image, the picture of the history of the landscape captured through a secondary characteristic has remained with me.

I want to implement a secondary characteristic.

Every time that I need to find a new route through the city by bicycle I struggle.  There is no indicator:  

                 whether the roads have cycle lanes (this info is available on some websites but not on google maps… and where the routes are available they are said to be incomplete),

                 where the roads are that prohibit bicycles (highways),

                 where there are lanes where bicycles can go but cars cannot.

I would love to have such an overlay on my maps program.  Would I develop it myself?  Are there many people such as myself and is that the only reason why this development would be done?    If it were 10 years ago, would I have thought that google maps would exist as they do now with satellite and streetview and routes?  When google maps came online, was it thought to be a business or simply a map, a free map?  I don’t have the knowhow now to make this a business but the google maps example means that nobody would pay for such a map.