Walk It is a new service that's quite an old idea really. You put in where you are and where you want to go and it maps the route for you. The difference to you standard route planning services is this on is for walking. So far they've got it sorted for London and Birmingham is the next on the list. It's currently in beta so you can test it and feedback to them if it's completely wrong.

Be interesting to know how they're getting their data. I suspect the meat of it will come from people submitting their personal secret routes but there isn't a slick way to do that yet, let alone a motivation for sharing. (For example, if you could store your personal routes and share links to them that would be a motivation. They could then by vetted and added to the database.)

But the general notion is a sound one. Walking, especially in cities, is a rarely considered option because, I think, you can't see the distance so you conceive of it as further than it is. In the countryside you can see across a couple of fields so it doesn't really feel like a mile. Not so when you're surrounded by buildings.

Anyway, they seem very open to any info you have on walking in Birmingham so consider this an invitation to share it.

via Birmingham Words