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.