The rain showers and thunderstorms this weekend gave us the perfect excuse to stay indoors and work on the website. We've listed the major changes below.

Better error handling
Did any of you try to plan a bike route to Jersey City, Yonkers, or Nassau County? If you tried to get to any of these locations -- or to anywhere else that is not in our street network database -- you probably noticed a nasty bug that could only be bypassed with a page refresh. We now handle this exception and a few others more gracefully.

Printing
The site now prints a nice, clean set of turn-by-turn directions. As we mentioned earlier, getting the map to print properly is going to take a little more work.

Wow, we were excited to launch Ride the City this weekend. Now that we've started receiving feedback, we're ecstatic.

Thanks for all of the positive comments. We're also pleased with your critiques, suggestions, and corrections. Read on for a few things we've heard that you're going to see changing:

Printing
This is probably the most critical item and one we've been working on for a while. Expect a nice, readable set of printed directions in the next week or so. Printing a handsome map may take a bit longer.

Traffic directionality
You may have noticed that Ride the City doesn't send you the wrong way on a one-way street. (If it does please let us know.)

This can be frustrating if your route starts or ends on a one-way street. One commenter asked if we could assume that cyclists can walk their bike on the first or last block, ignoring traffic direction. We've been working on this exact functionality! We'll let you know when it's ready.

Others have asked whether we take into account two-way streets that have a bike lane only in one direction (Central Park West, for instance). We do indeed! But we're still setting up the data for those cases. Keep checking back...

Route suggestions and corrections
We've received a lot of these, so thanks! Here are some things we've already fixed:

• We fixed some bizarre behavior in Central Park.
• The map now reflects the closure of Carlton between Atlantic and Pacific in Brooklyn.
• We restored access to City Island.
• Routes now have access to the Hudson River Greenway on Riverside Dr. off of Dyckman St. We have quite a few more connections to add to this greenway.
• We fixed a few East River Greenway connectivity issues. (Like the Hudson River Greenway, there are still many more to come.)
• We've further reduced (but not eliminated) the likelihood that you'll be routed down parts of Canal St, the Bowery, Delancey, Houston St, Flatbush Ave Extension, Atlantic Ave, McGuinness Blvd, Roebling St, and Driggs Ave.

By running all these routes (nearly 6,000 on Tuesday alone!) and sending constructive feedback, you're helping us improve the underlying data much faster than we could have on our own. As Brooklynites, we especially appreciate the local knowledge coming from riders in Staten Island, eastern Queens, upper Manhattan, and the Bronx.

Thanks for your help, and please stay tuned to the blog for further updates.

Ever need to park your bike at a bike shop to pick up a patch kit, a tube, or get a quick front brake check?

In addition to suggesting a safe route from start to finish, Ride the City shows you where bike shops are located along your route. Click on a bike shop icon (it looks like a sprocket, or gear) and you can see its address, phone number, hours and website. (If you aren't seeing the bike shops, trying zooming in a little closer.)

If you know of bike shops that aren't on the map or if you have a correction for us, please use the feedback form to let us know.

Welcome to Ride the City, a website that helps you find the safest bike route between any two points in New York City.

The concept is pretty simple. Just like MapQuest, Google, Microsoft, and other mapping programs, Ride the City finds the shortest distance between two points. But there are two major differences. First, RTC excludes roads that aren't meant for biking, like the BQE and the Queens Midtown tunnel. Second, RTC tries to locate routes that maximize the use of bike lanes and greenways.

Here are a few things you might be interested to know:

1. It's pretty fast! Ride the City searches through more than 125,000 rows in a database of New York City streets every time you run a routing query. We use Dijkstra's shortest-path algorithm with custom weighting based on based on whether a bike lane or greenway exists on a street segment.
2. RTC is only as good as the underlying data. We started from a data set with a huge number of inaccuracies, missing street segments, missing intersections, and missing bike lanes/greenways. During the past few months, we've done a lot of data cleanup, but we still have a ways to go. Like a fine wine (or a Brooks saddle), the routes RTC suggests will only improve with time.
3. You can help us improve RTC's data. We designed a feedback form that interacts directly with the underlying map data. Click a street segment and you can let us know exactly what you think about it. You can tell us whether you like riding on that particular street, or whether you avoid it at all costs.

We're really excited to present RTC's beta site to the current and future bicyclists of NYC. We hope it proves useful, and we hope you'll let us know your thoughts as you use the site.

Happy riding!