Image from http://vorg.ca
Nine months ago we brought Ride the City across the Canadian border with the start of Ride the City - Toronto. Today we're happy to launch our second Canadian city: Vancouver, B.C.
Ride the City - Vancouver comprises all the cities within a distance of about 40 miles, including Richmond, New Westminster, Burnaby, Port Moody, Port Coquitlam, Pitt Meadows, Surrey, Delta, Langley, White Rock, and even Victoria! By the way, if you'd like the map to start out centered in Victoria, just use this address: ridethecity.com/victoria.
For Ride the City - Vancouver, the data used for bike routing comes completely from Open Street Map (OSM), the volunteer effort to map the world. Anyone can edit OSM so that it more accurately reflects the real world; for example, to show that a street has a bike lane or to connect a greenway to where it meets a street. For people who are into mapping, OSM is a lot of fun and a great way to see your neighborhood develop before your own eyes. If you find a problem, simply right-click the map and choose 'Edit map in OSM'. We'll open a new window where you can make the changes in Open Street Map.
For those of you who aren't mappers, if you find any errors or have suggestions for better routes, feel free to contact us by email (info@ridethecity.com) or click the red icon on the lower-left corner of the map to send us feedback.
We'd like to thank everyone who tested Ride the City - Vancouver and to those who helped us to improve the routing, especially those who have been working for over the years to improve OSM. In particular, we'd like to thanks Russell for his work on OSM bike routes and troubleshooting our OSM logic, and to Zig for his work putting together bike shop data.
We believe that Ride the City - Vancouver will support the City's ongoing efforts to make Vancouver a first class city for bicyclists.
When it rains, it pours. Our launch of Ride the City - Vancouver comes behind Google's announcement last week that Google now provides bicycling directions for several Canadian cities. In other words, finding safe bike routes just got a lot easier for Canadians, especially for those around Vancouver. Feel free to give these new tools a test ride, since each has its useful features.
If you haven't used Ride the City before, check our our handy FAQs to learn more.
