Bicyclists in Seattle should feel fortunate that the creators of Ride the City chose their town as the latest addition to the online bike-route mapping tool.
Since launching the website for New York City last year, Vaidila Kungys and Jordan Anderson have added Chicago, Austin, Louisville, San Diego and now Seattle to their mapping tool.
Don't blame these guys for the slow roll-out; Vaidila told me that they have full-time jobs and update the website during coffee breaks, lunches and after work.
Feedback
Essentially, Ride the City is a mapping tool that finds the most direct route between two points, much like Google maps does for car travel.
There are a few important differences, however. It aims to avoid highways and busy streets and gives priority to bike trails and streets with bike lanes. Most importantly, it allows feedback so cyclists on the ground can help fine-tune or omit inappropriate streets.
Sharing features allow users to send a route to a cellphone or copy a map link to email.
Vaidila isn't saying where they're going next. “It's kind of fun to keep people guessing,” he says. But he writes in the blog that Seattle has been one of the most requested communities for the mapping application.
How it works
Here's how Jordan explained it on the Ride the City blog for the New York City roll-out in Spring 2008:
“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. …. Second, RTC tries to locate routes that maximize the use of bike lanes and greenways.
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It's pretty fast! Ride the City searches through more than 125,000 rows in a database of New York City streets every time you run a routing query. We use Dijkstra's shortest-path algorithm with custom weighting based on based on whether a bike lane or greenway exists on a street segment.
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RTC is only as good as the underlying data. We started from a data set with a huge number of inaccuracies, missing street segments, missing intersections, and missing bike lanes/greenways. During the past few months, we've done a lot of data cleanup, but we still have a ways to go. Like a fine wine (or a Brooks saddle), the routes RTC suggests will only improve with time.
- You can help us improve RTC's data. We designed a feedback form that interacts directly with the underlying map data. Click a street segment and you can let us know exactly what you think about it. You can tell us whether you like riding on that particular street, or whether you avoid it at all costs.
Challenge
Before officially launching in Seattle and other cities, Ride the City tests the common routes with local bike riders who offer feedback.
Interviewed recently in the Bike San Diego blog, Vaidila and Jordan said they met while enrolled in the urban planning program at New York University. They kicked around the idea behind Ride the City, but couldn't raise any interest with other groups so they decided to do it themselves.
They said that the biggest challenge has been getting data regarding bicycle facilities from different cities to fit into the mapping program.
The timing of Ride the City is interesting, considering that Google says it plans to launch a “Bike There” application sometime in the future for Google Maps [see “Google Maps adds bike trails; directions are next”].
It looks like Ride the City has beat them to the punch in at least six bike-friendly cities, with more on the way.
In addition to the Ride the City website, you can follow the Ride the City blog, Ride the City Twitter and Ride the City Facebook.
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