Laying out routes in Ride The City is a simple, drag-and-drop affair.
Received an update today from our friends at Ride the City, the bicycle route mapping site. They have been hard at work for several months now getting the service working for Austin and it’s now ready!
From their blog:
Well, we’re hopeful that bike riding in the Lone Star state is going to get even better today as we launch Ride the City – Austin: www.ridethecity.com/austin. Put your hands together!
We’d like to thank all those who helped during the tweaking and clean up of the data to improve the routes. We especially thank Nathan Wilkes and Jason Fialkoff, both of Austin’s Bicycle Program, and bike advocate Tom Wald. These guys gave excellent feedback and helped to comb through the routes to make sure the most common local routes are accurate. Thanks guys. (Some day we’ll show you one of Nate’s hand-drawn maps, really cool.)
We are really happy that we could at least point them in the right direction and make sure they knew about the recently-updated GIS layer for bike routes that the city had put together.
To test the service out, I mapped out three different scenarios and tested them. They were:
- A student living off of Hart Lane west of MOPAC that wanted to ride to the UT campus
- An Allandale resident looking for a route to work north of 183 in the Riata area
- An East Austin cyclist riding to work at a tech job in the southwest
I chose these arbitrarily, but wanted to see how well Ride the City could develop routes that crossed highways in particular, since these areas can be especially tough to navigate.
The first scenario was fairly easy, on purpose, because there has been some real attention paid to cycling infrastructure in the Far West area. Ride the City mapped this one with no problem at all and offered up a very safe route.
In the Allandale example, though, things got a little tricky. Of course, cycling along the north side of 183 is tough. I had the route stop at Riata Trace Parkway, and for the most part Ride the City gave me a safe way. However, the last mile of the route was along the Research Boulevard service road, which wouldn’t make me too happy, personally.
In the third example, the route was again quite good. There was a short segment where Ride the City suggested riding on Oltorf, but other than that it looked quite good.
Try your own routes and provide feedback to improve them, based on your own experiences at RideTheCity.com/Austin.
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on Jul 3rd, 2009 at 9:25 am
Actually, the Riata Trace example is correct – there’s no on-road alternative to getting there that doesn’t include the 183 frontage from at least Duval. (This was my bike commute for about a year – explored in this old hoary slideshow).
on Jul 14th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Hmm, the route from my South Austin to my parents down at Mopac/Davis Lane has me riding on 290. Biking on a highway like that isn’t legal, is it? (Although, my goodness, wouldn’t that be handy, given those wide, wide shoulders on that section of 290?)
on Jul 14th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Actually, Maureen, bike riding is not illegal on any of Austin’s road ways, based on a presentation I was sent from APD. The only place it says it is illegal is Mopac, but that was repealed years ago and the signs were never taken down. Now, whether it is advisable to ride on these roads is another matter.
on Jul 16th, 2009 at 10:44 am
Ah, now that is interesting. Thanks for the info!