bike map

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.

Toronto transportation staff are conducting a survey on the bike map they produce yearly to find out what people use, what worked, what needs to be improved.

They are certainly aware that improvements are happening quickly elsewhere as Ride the City and Google Maps includes bike directions.

What could also be improved is their survey collection skills. There doesn't seem to be much movement for comments or details on just how people are using certain sections. But feel free to contact the staff directly.

Did you know that they produce 150,000 maps every year? As much information as a bunch of pamphlets and a lot more useful. In a previous job as "Cycling Ambassador" with the City we had the wonderful job of helping to distribute all of these maps. It was a pretty good gig for a summer job - lots of exercise, half-decent pay and benefits. It was good enough to put up with the smog, heat, car traffic and monotony of manning tables. But I digress.

Help make a better bike map!

Google Maps has expanded their bike directions to Canadian cities, following on the heels of Ride the City, which launched their bike directions for Toronto earlier this year. I would have tried it out earlier but was stymied when I navigated to the dot ca domain by mistake instead of maps.google.com.

The bike directions work quite smoothly as we have come to expect from Google. There is a bit of mystery, however, to how they make decisions - presumably they have set their algorithm for the cyclist who will almost always choose the most comfortable route rather than the fastest. The Ride the City map at least provides the option of choosing "safer" or "direct" while creating a route. RTC also displays the bike stores and names the bike paths along the route, which is a nice touch and something that Google could learn to incorporate (this was pointed out by BlogTO which showed how Google just lists the paths as blank names - not particularly user-friendly).

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.

Yesterday Google added directions for cyclists, but only for U.S. cities. What about us folks in Toronto? Well, we've got Ride the City Toronto. RTC is a collaboration of two planners in New York, Vaidila Kungys and Jordan Anderson, who've been diligently adding over the last couple years city-specific cycling data to their mapping tool so cyclists can map the best route. The latest city to make the map is Toronto.

Google and RTC are going about it in similar ways; both need to get cycling-specific GIS information about bike lanes, trails and signed routes. They then combine that data into their database and create an algorithm that weights the different factors. When you media's interest in Google's launchmap a route you have the option of choosing a "safe", "safer" and "direct" route.

Because of the media's interest in Google's launch and finding out that it was coming to Toronto any time soon, it made sense to make public the previously beta version of RTC Toronto. You may find that there are still some tweaks to be made to the bike routes, so RTC encourages you to sign up as a user and rate the routes.

Youtube user JHGRedekop has posted videos of their GPS tracings from 2004 to 2009, covering a large part of the city.

A time-lapse animation of my recumbent cycling in Toronto, spanning 2004 to 2009. In all, about 650 hours of cycling totalling almost 8100km.

This is the total record of all my recumbent riding. Individual years are also available as separate videos, and there are more details in the comments on those.

The red path represents five minutes of cycling. Rides outside the borders of the map are represented by a red arrow; the longer the arrow, the further the bike is from the border.

The routes are similar to my own: I am a heavy downtown cyclist. I sometimes venture further afield, taking the Don, Humber, Waterfront or the major arterial roads.

I happen to like maps. If you don't share this trait, then I suggest you move on. You could watch the MC SpandX video "Performance" instead (thanks to BikeSnobNYC). As for the rest of you, look at this image of the OpenCycleMap layer of OpenStreetMap, a collaborative online map project, which seems to have Google beat when it comes to marking cycling routes.

Contributers (aka map nerds) go around with their GPS devices and map out features and routes. These then get uploaded (along with other public domain map information) to the OpenStreetMap website with a bit of tweaking. Local Toronto map nerds have been doing a good job on the cycling features of Toronto as of late. I decided to join in on the fun and edit the Moore Park Ravine trail which needed some corrections.

The link above defaults to the cycling layer which shows the Toronto Bikeway Network routes in transparent blue with floating route numbers. The paths are displayed as blue dotted lines or with a transparent blue stripe when they are part of the numbered network. The roads with a solid blue outline are the on-road bike lanes.

I Bike T.O. now has a bike map you can use along side your handy City map (both in paper and in a friggin' large pdf file.) It's a bit more useful because you can save it to your own maps, zoom in and add your own routes that follow the various bike routes.

The Toronto Cyclists Union has map of bike shops and Bicycle User Groups and BikingToronto has a bike lane map similar to this one.

If you'd like to add more official lines, add photos or correct mistakes let us know so we can add you to edit the map.

I'd like to start up another overlay map that shows all the unofficial routes that are quite beneficial for cyclists, such as the Caledonia Road short-cut to Keele across the tracks or the connection for the Highland Creek Trail around the Scarborough Golf Course. All quite profitable for the seasoned and novice cyclist.