routes

Ride The City is simplifying the way their cycling maps are updated by moving all the cycling route information to the Open Street Map (OSM) site, a world-wide crowd-sourced map that is edited by tens of thousands. Ride the City is already using OSM for the basic map (and for mapping the cycling routes in some cities) and now would like to move cities like Toronto to OSM to provide more flexibility to people to edit the routing themselves. This way people who live and ride in Toronto can be active participants in the development of the cycling information for this city.

OSM users can add the names of bike paths; change the direction of a street when a city makes a change (remove a bike lane when a City decides to make ideological decisions) and so on.

Vaidila Kungys, one of the two founders of RTF, said that they are looking for each city to add all the bike lanes/bike paths to OSM before they convert to just using the base OSM data so that it's seamless. This would also allow them to include all the surrounding suburbs. Here's what OSM looks like in Toronto (blue lines are bike lanes/dotted blue are paths). The Ride the City map wouldn't change because the map image is based on OSM, and adapted for Cloudmade, a spin-off company of OSM.

For those who haven't edited OSM before here's a howto video that shows how to tag a street to make it a bike lane:

And a shorter video to show how to make a new bike path:
http://www.youtube.com/user/ridethecity#p/a/u/0/ytx3iG2UzrA

If you are interested in volunteering to mark the bike paths and bike lanes for Toronto in Open Street Map, please let either me or RTF know.

Ride the City, a free website that this spring had expanded to show safer bike routes to Toronto cyclists, has launched a new version of its iPhone app that will work in Toronto and a bunch of American cities. Torontonians now have the chance to either use the website or the app to map out their routes.

Key features of the iPhone app:

• As on the website, the iPhone app steers cyclists toward routes that maximize the use of bike lanes, bike paths, greenways, and other bike-friendly streets. The app avoids high-traffic streets and steep climbs.
• Cyclists may use Ride the City at home and while they’re traveling. The app works in Austin, Chicago, Louisville, New York City, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, and Washington DC. New cities are added regularly.
• Find the nearest bike shops (and get directions to one) with just one touch.
• Users can adjust how far they’re willing to go out of the way for safer streets, and can choose a more direct route instead.
• The directions are displayed on an easy-to-read scrollable screen that also includes the distance, a time estimate and the amount of climbing on the route.
• Ride the City’s routing data is built on user feedback. The Report an Error button is displayed prominently on the map, allowing users to provide suggestions when the app steers them the wrong way.

Liz Hayward wrote this on the Cyclist Union Website:

ATTENTION BIKE LOVERS!
A petition was brought to my attention in a forum on midnightridazz.com encouraging google to incorporate a "bike there" option in google maps. Great idea, no? So if you haven't done so already, you might want to check it out.

Sounds good to me.

Photo credit: BikePortland.org

Editor's note: No, the photo has nothing to do with Google Maps, but it is a unique bike map! It's Portland's bike map on a bandana and it is real.