Google

The Schuylkill River Trail could get Google Street View treatment.

The popular recreational trail has been nominated as a finalist for Google’s Street View Trike competition, according to the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia.

The Schuylkill is among 24 finalists that were voted on from a pool of 25,000. If it beats four others in the parks and trails category, Google would photograph the trail for its Street View map service.

The Coalition is asking locals to vote for Schuykill against competition like D.C.’s Capital Crescent Trail and others. A win could raise the Schuylkill’s national profile, the organization says, which could give BCGP political clout to help complete the trail’s development. Avid bike advocates that we are at Technically Philly, we’re going to take our journalist caps off for a moment and urge you to keep it local.

Both the river trail and the Street View trike have a history with the local technology community.

In July, software developer Jon Bringhurst created Trail Reporter to track crime along the well-populated bike trail, as we reported. In June, Technically Philly was the first to confirm that a Street View tricycle was roaming Penn’s campus. Google spokesperson Sean Carlson could not confirm with us then whether or not the trike would photograph Philly’s bike paths and off-road trails, but it’s suddenly become a real possibility.

Princeton University was also nominated and is in the running for the competition’s campus category. Voting ends November 30.

He purchased a road bike several months ago to trek from his home in Manayunk along a 10-mile stretch of the Schuylkill River Trail to work, he says.

Yet his inexperience hasn’t stopped him from becoming an active part of the biking community. For what he lacks in biking mechanical know-how he makes up for in coding expertise.

He’s helping keep an eye on an apparently dangerous ride along the Schuykill with a no-frills incident report Web app he calls Trail Reporter.

Users can report problems on the route with simple, location-based Google Maps information and a description of the time, day and specific circumstance. The site is built on Django.

The new application debuted two weeks after a June 10 of the Montgomery County Cycling Committee, where 50 cyclists and representatives of several local police agencies met to discuss recent violence on the trail.

Bicycle enthusiast Brenda Miller was riding alone on a section of the Schuylkill River Trail in Norristown when she was assaulted by a half-dozen violent youths who formed a wall on the trail in front of her and punched her as she tried to penetrate past them, the Inquirer reported last month.

Bringhurst proposed creating the web application for incidents that didn’t quite qualify for police intervention, a way to archive the trail’s history. In seemingly no time at all, Bringhurst had created a working prototype and launched it in late June.

Now, the site is linked to by the Montgomery County Cycling Committee and the Bicycle Club of Philadelphia and receives a handful of hits per day. Incidents are increasingly popping up on the site. Last Monday for example, a user reported a fishing line was strung across the bike trail and a young, amateur videographer seen waiting for victims nearby.

Bringhurst says he hopes to expand the concept to other trails, but for now, he’s concentrating on the Schuylkill.