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.)

Here, on the right, you can see the new icons for the list view of directions. Now you'll be able to see more easily what kind of bicycle facility is on the street so that you know if you're on a bike lane, a shared-use lane, or a separated bike path.

Map layers: Another major overhaul is a new feature that now allows you to control layers for bike shops, bike racks, and bike facilities, which you can toggle on/off. So if you have no interest in seeing the bike shops, for instance, you can simply go to 'map layers' (top right of the map) and turn off the bike shops layer. 

Bike shops layer. We've changed the icons for bike shops to make it easier for you to see if a shop has bike rentals or not, which sometimes are stand-alone bike rental businesses. Also, we've added a bike share icon for cities that have a bike share program in place. Here are the new icons for bike shops:

Bike facilities layer. On 'map layers' you can now choose whether you want to view the base map alone or with bike facilities. If you turn on the 'bike facilities' layer, you can see all the bikeways, bike lanes, or other good streets for bicycling. This layer draws lines along bike facilities by using three different line styles: Green lines are bike paths that are separated from traffic, these can be greenways or on-street separated bikeways; solid blue lines are bike lanes; and dotted blue lines are shared-use lanes or other bike friendly streets. Here's what these look like up close.

Bike parking layer. Last, we've added a bike parking layer to show the location of bike racks within about 200 meters (600 ft) of your start and end points. We figured there's no need to show the hundreds of bike racks placed all around the city, that's just too much information. The bike parking locations are refreshed regularly from OpenStreetMap so if you don't see a bike rack on the map, you can add it. (For some bike racks, you can click the little U-lock to find out how many bikes can park there.)

These new icons and features are not on the iPhone app yet, but we plan on getting some of them to the app soon.