The New Online Mapping Tool Every Philly Person Without a Car Should Be Using

Move over, Google Maps.

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If you ever feel like a prisoner being carless in Philly, not anymore: The Clean Air Council just launched GoPhillyGo, a website designed to get everyone in Philly out exploring the city — those who have cars and those who don’t.

You can think of the website as a sort of carless Google Maps for Philly residents, but better. It allows you to create a multimodal route — so you can create one trip where you walk, bike and use public transportation — to go anywhere you’d like in and around the city. And if you don’t know where you want to go? Not a problem: The website allows you to use two features, one for directions and one to explore nearby locations. To use the latter, you just put in where you are and how much time you have — so, say you’re in Fishtown and you’ve got an hour to get somewhere cool — and GoPhillyGo will pull up a map of all the sweet spots, like Bartram’s Garden for instance, that you can get to in the timeframe you’ve got, plus how to get there.

Another really cool thing about the mapping tool: They’ve teamed up with uwishunu to feature special events on the maps, so when you’re looking for a cool spot to trek to, those events and where they’re happening pop up, too.

And for the bikers among us, you have the option to make your bike route safer — so on roads that have bike lanes and so on — or faster, or you can even make your route flatter. Awesome, right? Plus, if you’re using Indego, you can see all the bike share stations near you and how many bikes are available at that station at that moment.

The website also features environmental destinations that us city dwellers might not usually think of trekking to, like the Bristol Marsh Nature Preserve, the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, and more.

The one con? Unlike Google Maps, you won’t be able to use the website’s multimodal mapping tool on your phone, at least not yet. As Nick Rogers, the sustainable transportation director at the Clean Air Council, tells us, “The website is designed to be used more for trips that you’re planning, not for commuting every day. It’s for someone who is interested in exploring more of the city and doing it without a car.” So the idea is, you find the destination you’d like to go to, get directions, email them to yourself so they’re on your phone, then hit the road.

You can check out the brand spankin’ new website here.

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