Photography by Elliott Rader
Bicyclists have long been waiting for an Internet tool that makes it easy to plan bike-specific routes. Good news: Ride the City, a bicycle trip planning website launched its Chicago map in June 2009, and it's been getting better ever since. Then in March of this year, Google added bike directions to Google Maps. Other services are also available, so now bicyclists have many choices for route mapping.
Until recently, cyclists had to toggle between the City of Chicago's online bicycle map and sites like Map Quest or Google Maps because the mapping sites often include driving instructions that are not bike-friendly and don't take one-way streets into account.
Ride the City, which began in New York, offers three route options: "safe," "safer" and "direct." In a test last December, I discovered that the "direct" routes suggest streets too busy for my taste, but I don't need the hand-holding of the quiet, roundabout "safer" routes.
I wondered whether the service would be safety-conscious enough to plan a comfortable route for someone new to cycling in Chicago. I asked the site for directions to a part of the city I had never visited. Once out biking, I anticipated one road to be too busy so I changed my course to a side street. On the way back, however, I gave the service a full trial, following its recommendations exactly. The road I had avoided earlier has both a bike lane and slow vehicular traffic, so I began to trust the site.
I used it a few weeks later to get to a friend's house that was in a part of Chicago I rarely visit and noticed an error in the route. Ride the City insisted that Van Buren Street was 26 miles away, somewhere around 111th Street. Luckily, I knew how wrong that was. After I tried to list the street name differently, the site continued to give me a route that was off-base. I eventually put in a nearby street that I knew would get me close enough, but the experience was frustrating.
After reporting the problem to Ride the City, I received an immediate response and a promise to look into the error within a week. The problem has since been resolved, but I recommend cyclists continue to double-check their route on another map service for the time being.
The site is continually adding new features – one of which is street ranking. Thus, if you like or don't like a particular street, the system will take that into account the next time you develop a route that incorporates that part of town.
Other online mapping services for bikes don't create a point-to-point route. Bikely.com and MapMyRide.com, for example, use Google Maps to draw a route. These systems are mostly used to gauge mileage or create and share training rides for racers or roadies. They also allow the user to create a cue sheet, save routes and plant markers for breaks, stores, bike shops, etc.
CitySpokes comes closest to Ride the City's approach because it allows you to plug in intersections, landmarks or addresses to create bike-specific routes. As with Ride the City, there are still some glitches.
Bottom line: Take all these tools out for a spin. They'll take some of the guesswork out of your route-planning and wayfinding. And they'll only get better as more Chicagoans provide feedback.
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