Google Street View harnesses tricycles to go where cars can’t

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Google Inc.
this week launched its largest-ever collection of Street View images
taken by a humble but versatile vehicle — the tricycle — as the
Internet giant greatly expands the reach of the popular but
controversial program beyond public streets into hiking trails,
amusement parks, historical landmarks, parks and gardens.

Google’s Street
View service has mostly been limited to places where cars mounted with
cameras can drive. But now, Street View increasingly will include
images of public and private sites ranging from California hiking trails to Florida’s Sea World Orlando to London’s Kew Gardens.

To extend Street View to places beyond the reach of its ubiquitous Toyota Prius fleet, Google
is using ungainly, 250-pound, 9-foot-long, human-powered trikes with a
7-foot stalk of cameras on the back. The trikes were the brainchild of Google engineer Daniel Ratner, who visited cobblestone alleys impassible to cars in Barcelona, Spain, and realized Google needed something to record universities, parks, trails and other places, many of them private, where cars can’t go.

“I feel like we’re just scratching the surface of
what sorts of images our users want to see,” said Ratner, as he showed
off one of the trikes that he helped develop at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. “We don’t compare the trikes to the cars. We see them as being complementary vehicles.”

Google now has
Street View imagery for almost every major metro area in the U.S., as
well as in 27 other countries. The program does not earn Google
revenue directly, but the company considers it a valuable component of
Google Maps, which does have a large and growing advertising element,
said Deanna Yick, a Google spokeswoman.

Since it launched in 2007, Street View has also caused what may be Google’s biggest privacy problem, when its cars scooped up data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks in Europe and North America. Google
said the breach was inadvertent and has pledged never to use any of the
data it collected. One British village was so angry about Street View,
viewing it as an invasion of privacy, that residents blocked Google cars from cruising their town.

But Ratner said the reception was friendly as he pedaled the Street View trike in Southern California destinations such as Legoland and the Santa Monica Pier. The Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District granted Google a permit to photograph trails in five of its San Francisco Bay Area preserves, a move the group hopes will boost its visibility.

“It’s exciting. We’re trying to get the word out to the Bay Area and to the community about the open space preserves and the trails that are available to them,” said Leigh Ann Gessner, a spokeswoman for the district.

Google often
hires soccer players and other athletes to pedal the heavy trikes,
which have special gearing but are extremely heavy for a human-powered
vehicle. The most common public reaction to the odd-looking trikes?
“This is not tongue in cheek: They literally want to know whether we
have ice cream,” Ratner said. A boxy unit on the back of the Street
View trikes holds a generator and other electronic gear. But to a lot
of people, it apparently looks like a freezer.

The trikes will increasingly allow Google
to extend Street View beyond the public streets onto private property,
if an owner requests being added to the partner program. Google lets private partners post Street View images on their websites at no cost.

After he returned from Barcelona in 2007, Ratner was visiting the Ferry Building in San Francisco
with his wife when he noticed the pedicabs outside carrying up to four
people. A senior mechanical engineer who normally works with Street
View cars, he realized those trikes could be adapted for Street View.
Ratner and a group of other engineers began to work on the trikes
during their “20 percent time” — the aspect of Google’s culture that allows its workers to spend one-fifth of their time working on their own ideas.

Their first prototype had a single gear, and for the
electronics “we just, like, duct-taped all this stuff on,” Ratner said.
But by 2009, Ratner and his team were able to post the first non-car
images on Street View. The number of available trike images greatly
expanded Monday, as Google posted images from Europe, Asia and many U.S. sites.

“It’s been really exciting for me to see this thing go international, and have users have fun with it,” Ratner said.

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