Most of you have probably generated bike routes on Ride the City. But how many have contributed to the Ride the City basemap? The background image at Ride the City is provided by Cloudmade, a company that's all about services and applications that are based on Open Street Map (OSM), the volunteer effort to map the world. Open Street Map provides the data, Cloudmade makes services that help to get that data to the end user. With Cloudmade's Style Editor, developers can customize their own map style or copy other maps. Here are some of the map styles from the Style Editor:

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.