New Elevation chart and Aerial imagery!

Anyone up for a bike ride today? Spring has sprung and it’s time to shed those bulky winter clothes and dust off the bicycles – road, mountain, and commuter! Need to plan where to go? We’ve got you covered with our new and improved bike route calculator, available now on our Open.MapQuest.* sites!

We’ve added elevation information to the bike route narrative and new “avoid” or “favor” routing options. For those cycling enthusiasts that like to keep on trails and paths as much as possible, we have that option, too: click on the drop-down for bicycle options and select your choice of favoring a route using paved streets or trails and paths. Favoring a path with hills is still available or you can choose to avoid hills — tailoring your trip based on your route and fitness level. Here’s a long bike route near Boulder, Colo., with lots of elevation gain that would be fun to ride! Or, maybe you prefer a shorter bike route in Denver, Colo.

Kimi and the MapQuest Cruiser Bike!

Most of us feel bicycling is fun to do and keeps us healthy - getting exercise at your own pace while enjoying the great outdoors. Try biking to work a few times this week — notice the decrease in the amount of time and money spent in the car while, at the same time, help to improve the air quality and our environment. If you’re an experienced cyclist and want to try a century ride — covering 100 miles in one day — the Denver Century Ride is June 11-12, 2011, and is an excellent and scenic journey around the metro Denver area.

Another new feature we’ve added is open aerial photography and satellite imagery to the map! These images are gathered from publicly available sources such as NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the National Agriculture Imagery Program; and they add a richness to the OpenStreetMap map data that we think you’ll like!

Why not stretch your linguistic skills and try a new language this spring, too! We’ve added nine new languages to our open.mapquest.* sites: Cantonese, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Russian, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. Simply go to open.mapquest.com and click on the flag near the top right hand corner, then select your preferred language from the drop-down list.

Get on your bikes and ride!

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) quickly captured post-quake satellite imagery that could be used for tracing in OpenStreetMap (OSM).  MapQuest opened its servers for use by the global crisis mapping community (using JOSM and Potlatch 2)  for the sole purpose of supporting emergency relief and recovery operations in Northern Japan with this new imagery on March 14, 2011.

The collaboratively editable OSM project has previously been used by international responders to help save lives during the aftermath of last year’s earthquake in Haiti. This new post-earthquake imagery in Japan helps users crowd-source information, based on the imagery and news reports of which roads have been destroyed, where the hospitals are and other helpful information to produce real-time data and accurate maps for use by emergency responders. OSM Japan setup a crisis website (in Japanese and English) to help with the efforts.

The worldwide community quickly became involved, from OSM mappers to the New York Times:

• Quick tally of how many mappers pitched in: 218 users edited 389,431 nodes (points) from March 10 – March 16, 2011
• Screen captures (using JOSM) of map edits in Japan visually displaying the map edits
• Aerial imagery showing before and after the earthquake and tsunami

To get involved with the disaster relief mapping effort, follow this link detailing how to help.

new route options - pedestrian, bike or transit (in available markets)

Due to popular demand – and our desire for options – we’ve just released worldwide pedestrian and bicycle routing on all of our open.mapquest.* sites along with domestic transit routing on our Open.MapQuest.com site!

The bicycle and pedestrian routing is wholly based on OpenStreetMap data – if it’s in the data, we’ll route you on cycle paths and foot paths. Walkers, we have options for you – miles v. kilometers. Specifically for cyclists: we have road grade strategy options to avoid hills, favor hills, etc.  Try out these routes for fun:  Washington Park to Bear Creek Park in the suburbs of Denver, Colo., or this bike route from Bath City to Bristol City, UK.

Our domestic open transit routing option covers six major metropolitan areas: New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco, reaching roughly 90 percent of the nation’s rail ridership*.

Enjoy the ride!

* American Public Transportation Association

Puerto Rico: open.mapquest.com.pr Portugal: open.mapquest.com.pt Brazil: open.mapquest.com.br
Venezuela: open.mapquest.com.ve Chile: open.mapquest.cl Haiti: open.mapquest.ht
Finland: open.mapquest.fi Canada: open.mapquest.ca

We’ve also added some great new functionality for developers: Open Guidance Service, Open JavaScript SDK, Open Aerial tiles! Read this informative Developer’s Blog post containing all the details and sample code snippets. Alternate routes is another fantastic functionality that we announced earlier this week – read more here. And – not to be outdone – we’ve now got world-wide routing using OSM data! So, you can even now get a route from Dublin to Shanghai and be sure to view the alternate routes!

World wide driving directions with alternate routes: Dublin to Shanghai

We have one more cool feature that we’ve added specifically for our OSM mappers: a list of places that you’ve clicked on to edit in Potlatch 2 called: My Map Edits.  This functionality gives the individual contributor the ability to quickly and easily recall the maps that they contributed to and see how the map data is enriched by those contributions and others in the area.

My Map Edits

And finally, on our main U.S. site, open.mapquest.com we are joining in the Super Bowl fun with the addition of the Play-by-Play directions (read more here).  The OpenStreetMap community has also been working hard to add the new expanded highway, exit ramps, and other road changes in the area around the Cowboys Stadium. If you happen to live in the area, feel free to join in the fun to help improve and update the map.

We launched eight new MapQuest Open sites today, that are all based on data from OpenStreetMap (OSM). OSM is an information source encouraging real-time consumer contributions to indicate rapid change in geographic locations, points of interest and routing.

The below pictures in this blog post highlight the capitals for the following new MapQuest “open” country-specific sites:

* Australia: open.mapquest.com.au
* Denmark: open.mapquest.dk
* Ireland: open.mapquest.ie
* Mexico: open.mapquest.org.mx
* New Zealand: open.mapquest.co.nz
* Norway: open.mapquest.no
* Singapore: open.mapquest.com.sg
* Sweden: open.mapquest.se

To get involved in the OSM movement, visit the MapQuest Open Initiative pages to view upcoming events and additional information.

Denmark, Australia, Ireland and Mexico

New Zealand, Norway, Singapore and Sweden

Both of these new sites contain all the same features that we’ve been building on for several months – wonderful tools such as:

• Language selection – pick your favorite no matter what country site you’re on
• Right click to find the nearest feature in the map – whether it’s a road or a restaurant
• Sharing options galore – Facebook®, send to email or GPS
• Map toolbar – find parks or ATMs or even gas/petrol stations on the map

Much of the development of the country-specific sites is available for use on our Developer Network.  You can also find out more about OSM and how to edit or add to the map in your own neighborhood.

1. a large or major undertaking

2. a country or region where large amounts of people congregate

3. a cute name for a really neat project

We’re loving the new OpenStreetMap (OSM) data that is powering our open.MapQuest.co.uk site and our other international country sites like Germany and India.  We like it so much, we want to bring that goodness into all our consumer experiences in 2011 and that’s why we’ve launched Project HotSpot!

Project HotSpot (read about it here on the OSM Wiki and in this week’s Project of the Week post) is all about adding in the juicy details to vacation hotspots across the USA such as Walt Disney World, Sea World, Mall of America, etc.  To the left is an example of some of the great detail work that has already been done on Disney’s Epcot Center in Florida.  As you zoom and pan around on this particular mapped location – you’ll see details such as restaurants, foot paths, names of rides, and even restroom locations.

In order for Project HotSpot to get off the ground and be great – we need your help!  We need your help in adding the details to vacation hotspots such as Yellowstone National Park, San Diego Zoo, and even Wrigley Field in Chicago, Il.  Hotspot details can be done using Potlatch (here’s a link to our primer) or JOSM (Java OpenStreetMap Editor) or any other variety of tools and mapping techniques that are available.  We’ve also written a Beginner’s Guide to OSM that gives a wealth of information about OpenStreetMap and why it’s important.

There are many fine examples of the OSM data showing such fantastic details like the one-ways of the parking lots off Epcot Center Drive or the direction of the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride!  Even golf courses can be mapped – like the course in Coimbatore, India (below), if that’s your preferred vacation hotspot.  And, don’t forget our universities and college campuses – they need map details too!

Our new edit button is really three different edit button or links: below the search result (in the images below, I searched for Walt Disney World in Florida) is a link to edit this location; an edit button located at the top right of your map; and edit links that are built into the popup information box. The popup information box allows you to choose which OSM editor you want to use in order to edit the location (or surrounding area).  Your two edit tool choices are Potlatch 2 (hosted by MapQuest) or JOSM (known as the “Java OpenStreetMap Editor”).  Potlatch 2 uses a GUI user interface for easily making edits whereas JOSM allows you to download chunks of the OSM data onto your desktop to edit and then upload the newly changed data back onto the OSM servers for processing. (Note: be sure JOSM is already installed and running when you click the JOSM edit link.)

We now have a send to website feature added in – this will generate the code necessary to easily embed a MapQuest Open map into your own website. Just get a map of a cool location (like Cinderella’s Castle) and click the ‘send’ button on the top left of the MapQuest Open page.  You’ll see a popup window like this image (below) that will have generated the code needed to embed that exact location into your website pages.  Alternatively, of course, you can simply send a link to your map (or route) to your Facebook friends, email or GPS unit.

However, my most favorite new feature is the right click function!  Grab a map (such as Space Mountain) and right click with your mouse to see the “closest” feature in the OSM map data.  In the below image, I’ve captured what happens right after ‘right clicking’ on the brown circle that is Space Mountain.  Go ahead and try it, it’s fun!

When you first visit open.mapquest.in in your browser – the map is centered on India and the default language is English.  Here’s a nice map of Mumbai that has a lot of detail that has been created from scratch by OpenStreetMap (OSM) mappers from all over the world.   This new Open site has all the great features that our regular MapQuest sites have that you’re used to – a map style that is easy on your eyes, single box search for cities and locations of interest, and of course, driving directions with draggable routes enabled.

Another wonderful thing about this new site for India, is that it also has all the great elements on our MapQuest Open sites – map tiles updated every 15 minutes, with driving directions and search being updated daily.

Do you have a concern that the map data is incorrect or you just want to add in that great restaurant?  Simply right-click anywhere on the map, edit the data in OSM and it’ll appear in our tiles within minutes.

We also have these same great map tiles available for any website developer to use, for free!  Just check out the multitude of information on our Developer Network.

In addition to India, we’re continuing to round out our European map sites by launching two more MapQuest Open international sites in Europe: Austria and Belgium!

And…as if that wasn’t enough – we’ve also enable our carousal search bar for easy searching on the map near your location. Happy Mapping!

MapQuest has been involved with the OSM community since early July 2010 when we launched our first beta site, http://open.mapquest.co.uk.  This new site uses the new MapQuest page look and feel but using only freely available OpenStreetMap data in the map.  We also released 4 new sites with fun new functionality last month – read more about it here in our DevBlog.

The following is an excerpt from Richard’s blog post – enjoy!

What is the best thing that you can do for OSM? Add your neighborhood information!
The park you played in as a kid, your favorite local restaurant, even the hiking trail you enjoy with your family, these are all important potential contributions to OpenStreetMap. You are the expert in your neighborhood and you see it every day. When you put information about your neighborhood into OSM you share it with everybody else. When your neighborhood changes, you can update the information in OSM.  Or, when a street is newly made a one-way, you can update that information for travelers. When a new school is constructed you can add it to OSM for folks moving to your town.