Jordan from Ride the City here. It sounds like we whipped up some lousy routes for you! If so, I apologize. But I hope that you made sure to use the ‘rate the route’ feature in the menu. When you do, we see exactly the route you got and can address your complaint so the next time you run it, it works better.

I can confirm that we always have room to improve… Based on the possible combinations of starting points and ending points, Ride the City can potentially generate about 16 billion different routes in NYC. If we screw up 1/2 percent of them, we’re generating 80 million crappy routes.

I also want to weigh on bike routing philosophy for a sec. If we’ve learned anything in the nearly two years we’ve been doing this, it’s that there are two kinds of route feedback: facts and preferences. A fact? Canal Street in Manhattan is a hellish street to ride (at least during the day) and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. A preference? The Brooklyn Bridge has far too many tourists and you should always take the Manhattan Bridge instead.

We can (and have) come up with some general rules and weightings to take both route facts and route preferences into account, but there will always be differences of opinion.

To that end I want to plug a new Ride the City feature that is coming out in a couple weeks that I think will help address this: user-specific routing. Imagine you can login, click on any street segment in the city, and give it a rating between 1 and 7. The next time you generate a route while logged in, it takes your specific rating into account. Hate the Brooklyn Bridge? Give it a 1 and you’ll always avoid it. Love Canal Street? Give it a 7 and you can dodge trucks and inhale fumes to your heart’s content.

So stayed tuned for that and — in the meantime — please use ‘rate the route’ when we give you one of those 80 million lousy routes!

p.s. the ‘safer’ route from Greenpoint to Penn Station actually looks pretty good to me (and does use the Williamsburg Bridge). ‘Rate the route’ and I’ll see exactly what you’re seeing…

Try choosing a safer route. I tried going from Upper Manhattan to the East Bronx and it either guides me to Mosholu to Pelham Parkway or takes me across Fordham. If you choose direct it’s essentially doing what google maps “walk there” does.

@Alan @Stacy

The Iphone app should record user’s routes and use that data to weight the directions. Weighting by lanes and greenways can be clunky, and crowdsourcing would give you way more insight. I wish I had the time to tinker with something like this!

This fits an unfortunate pattern at Streetsblog however, where Minneapolis and Minnesota is ignored despite the facts: more bike trails than any other state, strong complete streets policies, and the largest bicycle commuter share of the top 20 metropolitan regions in the country. What gives guys?

Google Maps already has a pedestrian function which would almost work except that it doesn’t seem to take street directions into account. Oddly enough, if I ask it for a route from my apartment in the South Village to East WIlliamsburg, which is similar to the route shown above, it gives me a 5.2 mile route over the Williamsburg Bridge. But if I ask for a pedestrian route using the same locations, it gives me a 5.6 mile route over the Manhattan Bridge. Does Google not know pedestrians are permitted on the WillyB?

The issues with RideTheCity, as addressed on the BikePortland post, are the same as those for everyone else:
-How to weight the various factors in a routing algorithm other than distance
-The input data

The latter is one of the core problems, but you can help with it: edit OpenStreetMap, which BikeTheCity uses as input. For example, when I first tried BikeTheCity, it routed me over a pedestrian bridge with stairs. That bridge came from census data and was inaccurately categorized. I fixed it, and now RideTheCity no longer takes that route.