e-biking in Kansas City

Apple’s Maps app now will give you suggested bike routes. Pick your start- and endpoints and click the bicycle icon and you’ll get three suggested routes, each with turn-by-turn instructions and specifics like places you will need to dismount and walk your bike. Each segment is marked as a main road, side road, bike lane, shared path and pedestrian only (i.e. walk your bike). It even notes steep hills.

It’s designed for standard bikes, and therefore time estimates are generally much longer than an e-biker would need. And as e-bikers know, steep hills need not be avoided. You can click on an information icon to see a distance versus elevation chart. All in all, it’s pretty slick.

And while it gets close to what we would recommend for a given route, there are flaws. The map at the right shows Maps routes that are equivalent to A: The State Liner.

The suggested Maps route is the same except for one big problem: it keeps you on Rainbow Boulevard from Westwood north all the way to the Southwest Boulevard. Rainbow is a poor choice, and lengthening the time spent on the Southwest Boulevard’s terrible bike lane unnecessary.

Maps was so close! On one of its alternate routes, it directs you to the side roads like Wyoming down through the park and to Roanoke Road, just like The State Liner–a modification that keeps you off Rainbow and shortens the Southwest Boulevard stretch. Unfortunately, it also unnecessarily directs you to use State Line Road.

Comparisons to other routes are similar. Maps provides impressive suggestions (for an algorithm) and with some tweaking, can yield great routes.