A useful mash-up called Ride the City uses Google maps to find the safest bicycle routes from one point to another across New York City.
This is sort of the answer to the petition posted earlier this year at the Google Maps “Bike There” blog that seeks Google to include a “bike there” choice on all its maps in big cities.
The only difference is that it only works in the five boroughs of New York City, and it wasn't created by Google but by three cyclists — Jordan Anderson, Vaidila Kungys, and Josh Steinbauer.
Instant bike map
I'm not very familiar with New York City, so I choose a couple of random points to find a bike route using the application. I choose Allen Street down in the Lower East Side to the intersection of East 91st and Madison Avenue.
What Ride the City came up with was an 8-mile ride that utilized a high percentage of bike lanes and greenways. As you can see above, it wasn't a direct route, but it was a safe route; the green represents bike lanes or greenways (essentially off-street paths), and the purple represents other streets.
According to the website:
“The concept is pretty simple. Just like MapQuest, Google, Microsoft, and other mapping programs, Ride the City finds the shortest distance between two points. But there are two major differences. First, RTC excludes roads that aren't meant for biking, like the BQE and the Queens Midtown tunnel. Second, RTC tries to locate routes that maximize the use of bike lanes and greenways.”
You can also choose a “most direct route,” which will take you into harm's way. Sometimes a caution sign will appear on the map, this is a location determined to be particularly unsafe for cyclists based on the city's CrashStat data and input from other cyclists.
Also, sprockets on the maps show bike shop locations.
The website gets its data from 125,000 records in the city's LION GIS database. However, because the LION file doesn't include bicycle facilities, the creators made a Freedom of Information Act request to the NYC Department of Transportation and NYC Department of City Planning.
“That got us a little closer, but we still had to put in dozens of hours of data cleanup to get everything working more-or-less correctly.”
Among upgrades the trio is working on is making the application available to mobile devices like cell phones.
By the way, Bike There's author Peter Smith reports more than 40,000 people have signed Google maps petition to include the “Bike There” option on its maps.
More about Ride the City at TechCrunch
Recent Comments