RideTheCity is a cool mash-up application that allows you to plan bike routes based on safety and speed. By typing – or selecting – a start and end location in New York City, the application will find the safest and quickest routes by factoring in bike routes for “safest” trips and the shortest travel distance for the quickest trips.
The project is run by three bikers, Jordan Anderson, Vaidila Kungys, and Josh Steinbauer (Full disclosure: I went to college with Jordan but found out about this via NPR.) who connected Google maps to a few basic heuristic rules and added a cool logo. The GIS data comes from the city itself and is merged with Google Maps for display.
“Sometimes the most daunting thing about riding a bike in New York is figuring out the best route to take. How do you get to the bridge entrances? What’s the best way to Central Park from the Hudson River greenway? We created this website to help beginning bicyclists answer those questions,” said founder Jordan Anderson.
The system works well. In a trip from my house to Coney Island, RideTheCity suggested a nice route along the water. Unfortunately, however, its zeal in finding the safest routes sometimes brings up incorrect directions. For example, the system routed us through a secure military base during one trip. Had we not known that the road was closed we would have been sent on quite a ride.
Sadly the application only works in New York right now but there are alternative sources for other cities. The programmers used NYC’s LION GIS data to find and build routes.
Every time you search Ride the City, we look through more than 125,000 records in a database. Most of that data comes from the City’s LION GIS data. The City’s LION file does not contain bicycle facility data, so we 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.
The application is similar to hopstop.com in that it offers a focused window on geographical data aimed at a particular commuter – in this case, bikers. They’re currently working on fine-tuning the application to improve usability.
Is it really too much to expect a link that clicks through to the actual site being reviewed?
yeah for real. Way to annoy me when I’m excited about a site, TC.
sorry. I didn’t get enough oxygen as a toddler.
Google maps already has a bus, bike and walk feature that lets you map the trajectories via those modes of transportation.
Google Maps doesn’t have the bus and bike features for most areas yet.
If Google Maps has bike directions, there are a few of us who would like to know about it.
gMaps has bus and walk (and by the way, walking directions are still pretty prone to send you into not so safe areas if it’s slightly shorter by distance), I’ve never seen bike, and I imagine they’d have it here in SF if the feature were available.
John — perhaps your colleagues would be interested in partnering on a small project I’ve been working on — getting information into NYC Cabs to warn passengers to look for bicyclists before opening the door (pretty high on the Safety concerns of any NYC biker).
I have mtg with Chief of Staff for the NYC Taxi Commisssion this week to go over adding something like this http://www.flic...666/2656741534/ to the interactive video monitor, along with other info.
Sorry, offtopic, but GMAIL seems to be down, again. (writing from Brazil)
It would be great to have something like this service in Toronto (aka the bike stealing capital of the world).
this is awesome, finally!
what college is that, exactly?
Carnegie Mellon
well except the interface sucks, but it looks like that’s going to be improved?
the interface sucks?
damn. what does a non-sucky interface look like to you?
Firstly, Amsterdam has got to be the bike theft capital of the world, and we’ve had bike routs available for years through Routecraft http://www.routecraft.com I’d be intrigued to see a feature comparison by anybody who has the time as I don’t (at the moment).
Thanks fo the article anyway
thanks for the link – interesting.
as far as a feature comparison, not sure how worthwhile that would be right now. the incredible bike roots in Europe – with massive popular and political support, state funding, significant pro-biking bike policies — 30+ years of bike and bike-technology development — three guys in New York City wouldn’t be able to match that with just a few months of work. A feature comparison might not hurt, provided we put any comparison in context.
i’d be awesomely happy to have this for my city, SF. i could use it just about every day.
This is one of the better applications I’ve seen, great job! Are you guys using OpenLayers as your main mapping api? How do you like it?
UMapper – http://www.umapper.com
Hi Andrei,
Yes, we used OpenLayers. It’s fantastic. In fact, it could be more appropriate to title this post: “OpenLayers app for safe biking.” We use Google to display the base map tiles and for geocoding addresses. Otherwise all the markers, route lines, call-outs, mouse events, etc. are handled via OpenLayers.
Jordan
Is Garmin or TomTom listening to this feed… there is a need for a GPS for bikes… but make sure the disclaimer is rock solid…
imagine all the law suites because bikers missed that they were on the middle of the expressway
This is cool. Pretty good route suggestion, although there are a number of bike lanes that aren’t quite a safe as one might hope (6th avenue is mad dangerous).
Marko – couldn’t agree more. They ought to put the door on cabs like on old London cabs (they open the other way). If you ride into one it slams shut on the passenger – which I did all the time riding in London.
Peter from GoogleMapsBikeThere.org, here — I and a lot of other folks were and continue to be extremely excited about RideTheCity.com — it’s just a tremendous step forward for bike route mapping in the U.S.
Here’s our review from a couple of months ago:
http://googlema.../ride-the-city/
If you scroll down to the bottom of the review, you’ll read about what we think could be a very important aspect of bicycle-routing – a wiki-style feedback mechanism that ties directly to the routing data/algorithm. I don’t know the details of how it works, but it’s a great interface – very inventive and clean, and it seems like it could prove to be the right interface for crowdsourcing routing/directions information.
Google Maps Mania did a round up today on Cycling and Hiking maps:
http://googlema...oogle-maps.html
With rising gas prices and people increasingly looking for alternative, inexpensive forms of transportation I can see the need for this type of mash-up service increasing. Providing access to safe, bicycle friendly routes will help increase ridership and can alternatively be used by city planning officials to identify gaps in current non-bike-friendly city infrastructure.
Incidentally since the rise in gas prices, the bike rack at my office has been completely full requiring building administrators to hand out parking passes restricting bike parking to employees based in the building.
On my trip to Chicago this month I used the CTA/Google Mash up to get around the city. It was great….especially when finding alternate routes when some of the red line stations were shut down.
Hi,
I got one of my developers to create this facility: http://www.nort....uk/mytransport whereby staff and students can upload their own routes into Northumbria University
Hey John, check out http://www.bikemap.net, that’s at least as cool a mashup for bikes.
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