I cannot think of something more Big-Brother-like that every other person wearing a 360° camera helmet. Given enough of those, you can visit every place on earth virtually with live data, including everyone in that location. Hooray...
This is great for the Google Maps walking feature. Assuming they are gather gps data for these bicycle paths. This should enhance the walking feature to give it more specific and direct directions for being on foot or bike. The visual data is useful for cyclists to check road conditions. (I use street view to ensure that roads aren't dirt roads.)
In the DC area there are various trails that you can use to bike to work (or other recreational uses) however it is hard to actually map you route or see if there is a cut through between a parallel road and the trail. I would use this right now if I could.
I used streetview for a trip recently, I had the whole neighborhood around the places I was going mapped out in my mind from day one. It felt like I returned to a place I already knew. Pretty cool. Paths will only add to that.
Aside from the cameras, it's already known that they are using range-finding sensors to map building shapes, and I'd be surprised if they weren't recording GPS data to go along with the photos.
One thing people are missing is that using bikes doubles as escalation in the arms race between Google and locals who don't want their neighborhoods to be photographed with Street View. Considering that extreme cases of the conflict included a situation where a human chain was formed to prevent the car from driving into the area, it seems remotely possible that unpleasant incidents might occur when some Neighbourhood Watch attempts increasingly hostile measures to restrain an overzealous Street View cyclist who won't listen to reason. While I don't know that the photographers' walking orders look like, it seems like most of the cases involved photographers who were being flat-out callous to the locals, making the situation more severe than necessary and giving a bad name to their company. Since Google are the people suffering the consequences and getting the resulting negative publicity, it's still Google's problem. Google's PR, of course, isn't helping the matter when they act like the locals don't have a legitimate concern in not wanting their property mapped.
See, I recognize the usefulness of having access to this data, but it's still personal data. It's not like it's impossible to construct a useful database of locations in a manner respectful of local residents' privacy; but unexpected issues always arise. The very mission statement of Google opens a philosophical can of worms: "to index the world's information and make it useful". Useful? Who to? How can you tell when making a piece of information 'useful' to one person becomes an affront to another person's human dignity? This really is a problem for which, no matter how much one tries to foresee complications, there's always some new issue popping up. Resolving the issue requires a much greater amount of accountability - accountability to the public whose information is being gathered and 'made useful' - than we can get out of Google as a publically traded corporation. Heck, it arguably requires much more accountability than we can currently get out of the United States' _democratically elected government_ (otherwise we wouldn't be worrying about things like wiretapping).
So certainly this Street View thing is all in the name of progress right now, but I'm not certain that it's worth the while to humanity to be able to see photos of bike paths in Google Maps before we've got some answers to the accountability question.
This past May I was on vacation in Orlando, Florida, and while visiting Sea World, some Google employees were capturing the attractions inside the park using this type of bike.
