There’s a lot of excitement on the route finding and mapping front these days. One company in particular is working on Ride the City, below. In my opinion, it has one of the best interfaces out there and is definitely heading the right direction. They want testers and feedback on improving the mapping for Austin, so if you test their service out, let them know what you found.
Hi. We’ve begun testing a new version of Ride the City, a web-based
bicycle routing application. We’d like to roll out Ride the City for the
City of Austin and are seeking input. Would you be interested in
spreading the news on your blog to help us get more users testing it?
We need feedback to fix glitches. The best way to provide feedback is to
use the feedback form that’s integrated into the site. It allows us to review the
route that was generated along with your comments. You may also email us at
info@ridethecity.com with your suggestions. Feel free to pass this along
to your constituents.Known issues we are working on:
- The GIS data we have for Austin did not show which streets have bike
lanes and did not include off-street paths. This is obviously a major
hurdle we would like to overcome. If you have any contacts who can
provide this data, it go a long way toward quickly improving the
website’s routing results.
- The first and last steps of some routes may give you unexpected results
- We’re working through some bugs in Internet Explorer. Safari,
Firefox and Chrome should be fairly stable.Please remember that this is an experimental version of Ride the City
and still undergoing development. Please excuse the occasional
uncaught error as we continue to refine the interface, performance,
and features.Here is the URL for testing: http://geos.ridethecity.com/austin
on May 20th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
I pointed them towards Nathan Wilkes with the CoA Bike Program. Can y’all think of any one else better qualified for their GIS questions?
on May 20th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Nope, we told them the same thing. I figure they don’t have the most up to date GIS layer for the bike routes.
on May 20th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
Wasn’t there some project that was working on creating maps by using data downloaded from GPSs? Didn’t they have some event recently where people were supposed to go around making maps? I could have sworn I read about it on one of the local cycling websites/web logs.
Either way, assuming that they can use data from GPSs (and I don’t see why not) at least part of the solution is simple — have people make note of where the local paths are, and set their GPSs to log everything as they ride them. Then dump the data to the computers, and send them to these people.
Ideally each path would be ridden by several people (so errors could be minimized by averaging), and they’d be careful to turn off the GPS when they ride over roads and such, but it doesn’t sound terribly difficult — there aren’t that many such paths in Austin. Well, not paved paths … if you could dirt paths like the greenbelt and such, it becomes bigger, but either way — it’s totally doable.
on May 21st, 2009 at 11:47 am
Hi all,
We just got some very useful GIS data on the paved and unpaved trails around Austin. It’ll take a week or so to get it integrated into the site, and a little longer to make it truly useful.
This data also includes the bike/pedestrian bridges over the river — a really key part of the bike network.
One question about the paved and unpaved trails: Are there some that you find especially useful for transportation / quick-and-safe connections between on-street routes?
Thanks,
Jordan