The City of Port Phillip are starting a trend in adding public bike parking facilities to Google Maps to help create an easily accessible database for bike riders.
And the power of crowd sourcing could quite easily spread this initiative!
Transport planners at CoPP have been gradually adding new pins to Google Maps where a known bike parking loop or racks are located.
You can do this by right clicking on the map location in Google and selecting "Add a missing place" and then adding the bike parking infrastructure of facility. CoPP have labelled them as "Public Bike Parking", as you will see in the search function.
You can even attach a photo of the bike parking so prospective users can suss it out before they arrive.
Over the past few months since starting the initiative, CoPP have received nearly 500k views on their combined map additions.
How can you help?
No matter where you live, next time you chain up your bike on a piece of public bike parking infrastructure, you could consider taking a quick snap and then adding a new new pin to Google Maps for future visitors' reference.
You can name it anything you want, but for ease of consistent search purposes across the city, CoPP's "Public Bike Parking" seems like a good suggestion.
This crowd sourcing approach would of course rely on the wider bike riding community keeping the map network up to date by reporting or removing invalid references as they come across them.