Left on Haight, right on Pierce, and straight on til morning

Original photo by Erik Anderson

Just in time for the sun's critically acclaimed debut, the Internets has once again plotted to increase our digital dependence. Google Maps now has a bicycling option!

If you're a biker in San Francisco or Oakland, you don't need me to tell you that you gotta pick your routes around these cities. One false move and you're falling into the ruts of MUNI train tracks or on a freeway on-ramp (don't laugh, it happens... to me). But no longer, or at least less often, will you have to deal with these small catastrophes.

Just type in your start and finish and the Goog has your most two wheel friendly route between A and B sorted. Sure, it's basically an algorithm that connects the marked paths and wide shoulders easily visible on your SF Bike Map- Google's still at beta when it comes to the ins and outs of our city's considerable altitude changes, or our multi-tiered, if not hierarchical ways of getting the bridge and tunnelers in and out of here. A quick search for the route between my pad and my night job advised me to head up Eddy Street, which my quads tend to eschew for the less demarcated, but more planar blocks of Turk and Golden Gate. And tell the site you're headed for a wild night out from SF to East Bay to see that new William T. Wiley showing at UC Berkeley and the site will recommend pedaling across the Bay Bridge- via the Ferry Building. But they're trying, goddammit.

At least now your out of town houseguests won't wind up hyperventilating on Van Ness Avenue on that loaner cruiser bike anymore. So for today, digital corporate megalith, you get golf claps- you are one step closer to becoming the website I go to for everything, all the time, always.