new jersey geographer

Bing Maps now incorporate landmarks in their driving directions. This is a really great feature, as it will tell you what to look for while driving in unfamiliar territory. I experimented with incorporating landmarks into Google Maps driving directions about a year ago. You can take my demo for a spin here. Bing Maps goes a few steps further by identifying features ahead of turns to inform you that if you pass them, you’ve missed your turn. That and they have more than 6 points around New Brunswick as landmarks.

This is a great feature that should be incorporated into all the major routing and map providers. Considering Google and Microsoft are both catalogs of business and place name data, this additional functionality should not be difficult to keep up-to-date. They can take it even further by incorporating Street View and/or Birds’ Eye View – focused on the specific landmark – into the driving directions.

Kate and I recently visited her family in Estero, an unincorporated portion of Southwest Florida. While staying at her parents, we decided to take a walk over to the mall across US 41. Kate’s parents live in a “gated community,” a pod of residential development connected to the transportation network by (usually) one access point that is secured by an electronically controlled gate.

Now, there’s not many places to walk within the confines of the community. Most of these residential developments have a communal recreation area, typically containing a pool, tennis courts, and a clubhouse. Some, like the gated community my brother-in-law lives in, split the clubhouse in two and arranged the buildings to resemble a mini-Main Street, only about 150′ long. Due to the close proximity of the clubhouse and the cost of parking, there is usually only enough parking at the clubhouse for a few guests. Despite this, there are no sidewalks within many of these gated communities. It’s clear that you are to walk to the clubhouse, but rely on the car for all other trips.

So, back to the walk itself. You can follow along using a map of the pictures on Flickr.

We leave her parents' condo and begin walking down the asphalt towards the gate.

Approaching the gate. You'll notice that the gate only prevents automobile access.

The trampled grass clearly shows the demand for pedestrian access to US 41.

Now, once you make it up to US 41, you’ll find a typical (4 feet wide, plain concrete) residential sidewalk, however it’s set 10 feet from the roadway and slightly below grade. This is done because US 41 is a very wide, high speed county arterial. The majority of the retail within Lee County is on US 41. It’s the epitome of the new suburbs – all land uses carefully divided through Euclidean zoning, accessible only by car.

See? We're pedestrian friendly!

Detail of the Lee County Bike Map. Red denotes "dual facilities."

The Lee County Bike Map lists this section of US 41 as having “dual [cycling] facilities,” those being a sidewalk and a paved shoulder.We did pass one person utilizing the sidewalk as a bike path. This was the only other person we saw outside of a car. Cycling makes sense – given the distance between stores and residential developments, using a bike increases your range considerably. Walking two miles (or more) might be considered ridiculous for those with access to a car, however biking two, three, five or miles in Florida can be considered recreation. Encouraging cycling to work, the convenience store, etc. would help Southwest Florida reduce VMT and congestion by getting single-occupancy vehicles off the road. Despite “dual facilities” the physical configuration of the streetscape makes all forms of travel besides the personal automobile seem dangerous and inhospitable. There’s no pedestrian oriented signage, no signal prioritization, no shade or shelter and barely adequate sidewalks and crosswalks.

Cross at your own risk. The walk sign lasts about 3 seconds. The walk across at a casual but brisk pace takes around 10 seconds. The curbcuts are ADA accessible, but the timing of the light itself would cause problems for those with physical disabilities.

Once you cross US 41, there's no sidewalk to get into the shopping center. You're walking there? Who walks? What's wrong with you?

Just like the gated community across the street, this pod of retail development is connected to the world by asphalt and accessed by car. Coconut Point does have a residential component and unfortunately Simon took down the website they had up with a great map and detailed renderings, so I can’t point to you a nice package of evidence that they thought at least some of the project through. The interior walkways throughout the “lifestyle center” are actually pretty nice.

The interior walkways are wide, with a planting strip.

Too bad you cannot easily get to the more friendly pedestrian pathways without a car. The single use pods of commercial residential development set a mile or two apart inhibit easy pedestrian access. The mini-center within Coconut Point is a step in the right direction for future land development in Florida, however considering how much of the area has been built out, it will take serious planning and a change in the collective vision of Southwest Florida before we see true center-based development.

A Google Street View car hit a deer while imaging a road in upstate New York. You can still see the deer in the driveway in this Street View. The Register has the pictures of the incident. The pictures have already been removed by Google – considering the driver stopped and notified police, why were they even posted to begin with?

Automobile manufacturers are cutting back on production as they cannot sell what they have on hand. This results in the staging areas at the ports becoming crowded with new cars that have nowhere to go. I find this ironic (in the Alanis Morrisette kind-of way) in that the icon of mobility and freedom is now a immobile burden. How will the car dealers handle this back log? I sure hope it involves a man in a cowboy hat with a loud tie screaming that “everything must go!”

Seriously, I do hope that the industry realizes that bailouts are not a sustainable method of survival. They need to adapt to changing markets and lifestyles. And they should all be working to that goal, because I believe that the first one to the ring will be the only one to survive.