While the older neighborhoods included tree-lined streets and homes with porches, the newer developments included wide, tree-less streets that were dominated visually by garages and parked cars, and weren't well connected.
One of the major issues in the code update was to limit sprawl and improve the quality of new development. Here's an aerial of the city for perspective. My Ellensburg reconnaissance included a citywide bicycle tour, occasional driving tours, and lots of Google Earth fly-throughs. EllensburgĬirculation & block patterns using the Ruler Tool I will use three recent project examples to share how I've used Google Earth in planning projects: (1) Ellensburg (WA) Land Use Code Update, (2) Boise (ID) Design Guidelines, and the (3) Bellevue (WA) Downtown Livability Initiative. However, there are many places and features that can't be seen from public spaces, including green roofs, internal courtyards, private landscapes, or roadless areas with challenging terrain. Of course, it's best to see places and examples in person. While I mostly use it to look at conditions and examples locally, it's just as easy to fly around the globe to examine international places and development examples. I use it to examine development patterns, street design, recent construction, or the context of a particular site or street. This can be a particular site, street, neighborhood, entire city, or geographic region. We want to investigate what's on the ground. Simple reconnaissance is the most obvious reason to use Google Earth. Hopefully there are a couple of useful takeaways. In this article, I'll share some of the ways in which I've used Google Earth (and Bing Maps) over time. They include better street-view images, 3D buildings and trees, and historical imagery, which I'll discuss more below. (Bing Maps are pretty useful too - with their aerial perspective views, which aren't offered on Google Earth.)Īnd Google Earth's capabilities just keep getting better, as new “goodies” are being added all the time. When curiosity beckons or specific research information is needed, you only need a few clicks on the mouse and keyboard and voila, you are flying overhead. As a planning and urban design consultant working for several communities throughout the Pacific Northwest at any given time, it's an incredible tool to have at your finger tips. Rarely a day goes by at the office now where I don't use Google Earth.
The Android version will be launched soon by Google Earth.Category: Tools for Planners, Guest Author The new updated version of Measure Tool is available for Google Earth for Chrome and iOS.
The ability to change units is available on Google Earth for Chrome and iOS today and will be available for Android soon. In the tool, there is a list of all the units from which the user can choose the desired unit and obtain the information required. The new features would allow users, both amateur and professional, greater liberty to freely explore the world on Google Earth and calculate any distance in any unit of their choice, like the distance from Tokyo to Manila (1,617 nautical miles),or the footprint of London’s Hyde Park (350 acres). The new update allows users to choose the distance and area units that they require, including centimeters, meters, kilometers, nautical miles, both feet and meters, and even smoot, which is a nonstandard, humorous unit of length created by an MIT fraternity prank. Google Earth took the feedbacks seriously and announced in its official blog post that new features have been added to the Measure Tool to enhance its functionality and to make it more precise.
However, the user feedback on Measure was that while they enjoyed using Measure to calculate area of exotic locations like Fasta Åland, tracing the footprints of seven wonders of the world, or calculating the perimeter of fortresses in mountainous terrains, what they were expecting was more flexibility in operating it for professional purposes like maritime navigation, aeronautics or for obtaining highly precise info. Google Earth also added a new feature called Measure recently which allowed users to measure the area of a place or distance between two locations. Google Earth is the most common and perhaps the best-known tool that provides 3D representation of Earth based on high-resolution satellite imagery.