Many people love bike rides. Many more people love using the bike at the gym more than going for a ride outside because they can track mileage very easily. What many people don’t realize is that Google provides everyone a tool to track their mileage on a bike, a walk, or a run. The solution: Google Maps.

Google, as everyone knows, is an awesome search engine that dominates the world of searches. Google Maps is Google’s map application. What many people don’t realize is that with a Gmail account, a person can create their own map. Whether this is for restaurants, landmarks, or dog parks it does not matter. The point is that Google Maps lets people create their own map.

The beauty of this is that a person can plot his or her bike ride on the map. Once this is done, the simple on-screen tools let the person put in starting points, end points, and everything in between. The map will calculate the distance as the lines are drawn in which makes it really easy to figure out. The beauty is that the total mileage can be written into the description of the map. This allows the cyclist to pick a previously ridden path based on how far he or she wants to ride that day.

An example of this principle was recently used by the City of Boston. Boston wanted to figure out where to put in bike paths and where to strip existing paths but didn’t want to put in a bunch of paths that no one would use. As a solution to this, the director of the project created a Gmail account for the city of Boston. The username and password were given to cyclists across the city.

The cyclists were then charged with entering their own bike rides into the system. Each cyclist was asked to put in the date, time, and starting points of each individual ride. The result is a comprehensive map of the most-used bike paths in Boston.

What’s even more beneficial is that people can access the map from wherever they want as long as they have the password and username. It gives people alternate ways of commuting to work by bike. In addition, the concept allows people who want to bike to work but might not know how to get there a map of exactly what someone else has done.

For more information on the world of cycling and innovations in bike trails, please visit http://www.bike-locks.com.