If you're a regular user of Ride the City, you've probably already noticed the recent changes that we've rolled out on the map. Ride the City looks different and has some new features. There's been a lot going on so let's boil things down a bit...

New Icons: First off, we're really happy to have new icons! We were lucky to find Kelly Shea and James Spahr, avid bicyclists and graphic designers, to help us design icons that are sharp, colorful, and easier to grasp quickly. We began brainstorming in the springtime and came up with lots of great ideas; Kelly and James were very creative, professional, generous, and fun to work with. (We certainly recommend them if you need any design work.)

If you've been using Ride the City for a while, you probably noticed that we changed our base map a couple of weeks ago.

When we developed the second generation of Ride the City we decided to take a chance on using map data and technology from OpenStreetMap (OSM) and CloudMade.

OpenStreetMap is (in their own words) a "free editable map of the whole world." It gives us (and you) the ability to add points of interest, fix street lines, add the location of bike lanes and other bicycle infrastructure and generally improve the maps for everybody who uses OSM – not just users of Ride the City.