Interview with Ride the City’s Jordan and Vaidila

You may have noticed the link to Ride the City on our side bar. But what is Ride the City?

Ride the city is a “website that helps you find the safest bike routes in cities.

Like MapQuest, Google Maps, and other mapping applications, Ride the City finds the shortest distance between two points, with a difference. First, RTC avoids roads that aren’t meant for biking, like highways and busy arterial streets. Second, RTC tries to steer cyclists toward routes that maximize the use of bike lanes, bike paths, greenways, and other bike-friendly streets.

Jordan and Vaidila
Jordan and Vaidila

While bicyclists continue to petition companies like Google to create a “bike there” option to aid in planning routes, Vaidila Kungys and Jordan Anderson decided to create a site that would make that dream a reality. “Ride the City was launched by Vaidila Kungys and Jordan Anderson, friends who met while enrolled in New York University’s urban planning program.” They created a resource where bicyclists could create bicycle friendly routes to get around a city.

When we learned that Ride The City (RTC) would be officially launching in San Diego later this month, we were ecstatic. We contacted the brains behind the operation to find out more about Ride the City.

BikeSD: What was the original idea behind Ride The City? Since you originally started in NYC, were you filling a void?
RTC: While we were in grad school, we talked a lot about something like Ride the City. At one point Jordan reached out to Hop Stop to inquire if they’d be interested to add bicycle routing to their mix of transportation options, but the idea didn’t grab their attention. We decided to give it a shot for NYC, and since then we’ve begun to expand it elsewhere. We were definitely filling a void because aside from the printed NYC Bike Map, which we still recommend as the gold standard, but before Ride the City it was not easy to get a quick answer for a best bike route.

BikeSD: Now that you have begun to expand into other cities, what have been your challenges in providing route suggestions? Do you have someone local in the city to advise you of locations of bike paths, bike shops, etc?
RTC: In other cities we face the same challenges that we hit in NYC, essentially acquiring data on the existing bicycle facilities. It’s actually been surprising to find that cities have such varied methodologies for determining bicycle facilities: some cities use the traditional categories for bike facilities (separated greenway=class 1; on-street bike lane=class 2, etc); others categorize the use rating of streets; while others determine the level of service for bike routes. We have to make sense of the data before we can plug it into Ride the City.

Local partners are definitely key to making Ride the City a useful tool because, after all, if locals aren’t using our routes, it doesn’t make sense that we should think they’re the best safe routes. When we work on a city we strive to collaborate with local partners to suggest bike routes and, at a minimum, to have them test the routes generated by Ride the City before we launch the new city.

BikeSD: What criteria do you look for when deciding to include a city in the Ride the City database?
RTC: Most importantly, we’re looking for cities. Ride the City targets urban centers so our focus is not the small rural community. This leads us to look to the largest cities, such as NYC and Chicago. We’re also a bit whimsical about it, choosing cities that we think would be fun to have for Ride the City: Austin’s not really that big but it’s a huge bicycling town and, well, everyone loves Austin.

BikeSD: What has been the most challenging aspect in creating and maintaining Ride the City?
RTC: Probably maintaining full-time jobs while trying to create and expand a project that could easily use a couple of full-time staff members. Aside from the data and programming, which takes a lot of time, we’re trying to promote the site, build strategic partnerships with local bicycling groups, respond to users feedback to improve the service, post to our blog, and at the same time we’re dealing with funding, legal, and other administrative
issues.

BikeSD: How can the bicycle community in San Diego support Ride the City?
RTC: The best way to make Ride the City useful is to generate routes and, after riding the route in the real world, to come back to the Ride the City website and submit feedback through the “rate the route” link. Feedback comes straight to us and we use it to improve Ride the City so that future routes will take appropriate comments into consideration, whether good or bad. Users make Ride the City better every day.

Thank you Jordan and Vaidila for taking the time to answer our questions. Ride the City is a valuable resource and we’re sure it will benefit many riders in this canyon filled city.

Readers, be sure to use the site and offer relevant feedback as needed.