Valley Pulse

When the folks with Google Maps doubled their Street View coverage Dec. 9, they added a few Shenandoah Valley streets to their offerings.

In addition to Stuarts Draft Highway, users can now see the Blue Ridge Parkway, interstates 64 and 81 and a portion of Greenville Road south of Staunton. Google Street View offers the ability to see 360-degree panoramic photographs of chosen streets. Instead of the bird’s eye view, site users can click on streets and look around as through they are on the sidewalk.

Also this month, Bike the Valley presented a new site with online maps of bike routes in Augusta, Bath, Highland, Rockbridge and Rockingham counties. The bike mapping service is a start: the maps include topography, but are a bit lacking aesthetically.

Bike route mapping continues to grow in popularity and accessibility. My favorite mapping application is based in the Twin Cities: Cyclopath lets riders input “bikeability” ratings, like a wiki. Riders can also physically change the map to add bike-specific routes (like alleys and dirt paths) that wouldn’t normally come up as routes in a street-based mapping system. It’s a geowiki.