This guest blog post is brought to you by Erik Carlson.

Ride the City Twin Cities has launched! Yes my two-wheeled friends you have a new way of navigating the best bike city in the good ol' U.S. of A. What's more, Ride the City launched on the summer solstice. Warm weather, more than 15.5 hours of sunlight, and great bike routes... cue hallelujah chorus!

If you follow Ride the City's twitter feed, you may have noticed that we hit 100,000 bike routes generated since the new version of the website launched in May. That's an average of more than 1,200 routes a day!

I thought I'd throw up some stats to help tell the story. Since May, Ride the City generated 85,500 bike routes for New York City, 13,100 routes for Chicago (launched June 1), and about 4,000 routes for Austin (launched July 1).

As you can see in the pie chart, about two-thirds of routes used the safer route (the default option on Ride the City), 18 percent used the safe route, and 16 percent used the direct route.

I've also included a graph below that shows the trend in all bike routes generated by day. (The mid-June dip in bike routes generated was during an especially rainy period in both New York and Chicago.)

If we can keep up this level of activity (and grow it a little more), we're on track to hit 500,000 bikes routes generated by May 2010. That's a challenging goal given the long winter between now and then. But we're working on some new cities, new functionality, and new partnerships that will hopefully keep you coming back for more!

Ride the City – Chicago is live! Go to www.ridethecity.com/chicago.

We’ve been working on this for several months and are really happy to have it formally launched. Spread the word to your Chicago peeps. Let us know if we’re missing any bike shops and, please, if a route has problems, provide feedback by clicking the feedback link. For all those who helped and provided comments, thanks a ton!

When you're out on a bike ride and cruising through new territory, carrying a map is probably a good idea. Then again, it can also be a drag to take it out, unfold it, drip sweat all over it and crunch it back into your bag.

Well, now you have one more option to deal with less paper maps: bike routes sent directly to your cell phone as a text message.

This is how it works. Once RTC gives you a route, use the share drop down to choose Send SMS. In the pop up, enter your cell phone number, carrier, and click send. A summarized version of the directions should arrive in no time.

Please let us know how this works by providing feedback so we can improve the glitches.

This weekend is not only Memorial Day Weekend, it marks the beginning of Ride the City's new version 2.0. On Saturday, May 23rd at 2pm we're having a party at Radegast to hang out with y'all, get your input, and give away prizes and gifts. Btw, it's worth it if only for good food & drink.

To highlight one new feature, see the picture above. The new version distinguishes which bike shops have rentals (R within the gear) from which businesses have no rentals (gear without an R). Also (but not in this image) are the businesses that have no bike repair, only bike rentals (R without a gear).

We hope this feature will allow you to find the business you need, without having to do your own sweaty research.

There are other updates, too. We'll go over them this weekend but if you can't make it, don't worry, we'll also walk through these in future posts.

We hope to see you at Radegast.

So, I had a great ride ready to post this weekend but it looks like a soggy one, so here are some thoughts on riding in the rain and some alternate activities if you’re not ready to make the leap to wet-weather riding.

Riding in the rain is more fun if you have:
a) fenders
b) decent, brightly colored rain clothes (and rain boots)
c) a waterproof bag to carry a change of clothes in if you’re going somewhere nice
d) a chamois to wipe down your bike once it gets all the rain gunk kicked up on it from the road

After five years of riding around NYC I still do not have fenders. This is masochistic and also just plain silly. If it wasn’t for the Five Borough Bike Tour this weekend I’d go buy some.

For those of you doing the 5BBT (oh, sorry the TD Bank Five Borough Bike Tour), some tips on how to survive:

May is national Bike Month and here in New York City we’ve already started celebrating Bike Month NYC! Posters are up in subways and on bus shelters reminding people that there’s a more fun way to get around the city! There are nearly 200 events scheduled for Bike Month NYC from rides to repair classes to art shows. And here on the RTC blog I’ll be posting a few of my favorite rides to some of the more far-flung reaches of the City (and places to eat when you arrive).

And for those of you who have the misfortune of not living in New York, as Al Roker says… check out what’s going on in your neck of the woods:

Bike to Work Day
Washington, DC: WABA events
San Francisco: SF Bike events

Bike to Work Week
Massachusetts: Bay State Bike Week
Los Angeles: La Bicycle Coalition
Chicago (June): Bike Commuter Challenge

Bike Month
New York City: Bike Month NYC
Philadelphia: Bicycle Coalition events
Seattle: Cascade Bicycle Club events

And check out the League of American Bicyclist’s listings for events nationwide.

Since the launch of Ride the City in 2008, we’ve been working to provide you a better, more functional website. Updates will include the creation of an SMS interface to send directions to your phone, an embeddable version to drop onto your website, language support, and user interface improvements to give you better overall performance. Also, the bike shop info is more up to date.

So at 2pm on Saturday, May 23 we're having a party at the Radegast to celebrate the website's new look and feel. It's a good time to come out to join us not only to take part in Bike Month, but also to give us your ideas to help us improve the website.

Come by to have some food & beer, and share your thoughts. We hope to see you there.

It's Saturday in New York and you want to enjoy the city. What better way than to ride a bike, right? Well, if you don't have one, don't worry. You can always rent a one, and beginning on Saturday, August 9th, you'll have a great opportunity to rent a bike and ride the city in safety! NYC DOT is closing an entire avenue nearly 7 miles long in Manhattan to allow people to enjoy the city without honking and without dangerous cars during Summer Streets.

There will be a ton of activities, from what we can tell, including music, yoga, walking, dance and bike riding (and rentals). Ride the city in safety during Summer Streets.

A few weeks ago, we blogged about Bike Around Downtown, the bike share program at South Street Seaport this summer.

If you still have serious Velib-envy, you can participate in a bike share program from July 10-14 during New York Bike-Share Project 2008, a program that is sponsored by The Forum for Urban Design, the Storefront for Art and Architecture and City Bakery. It's free and there are four pickup/drop-off spots around SoHo, the Village, and Flatiron/Union Square.

If you want even more exciting bike share news, you need look no further than a press release from the NYC Department of Transportation.