Everyone knows Eugene, Oregon is the running capital of the world: Track Town USA, where Prefontaine helped give birth to Nike. As a result the city now has miles and miles of running trails. Well, it turns out that it's also got lots of bike lanes and bike paths. So many, in fact, that the League of American Bicyclists ranks Eugene as the fifth best city in the U.S. for bicycling (behind Boulder, Portland, Davis, and Corvallis).

Well today we're proud to launch one more free resource to help Eugeneans get around by bike: Ride the City - Eugene. Ride the City is like other routing applications except that it prioritizes bike paths, bike lanes, and shared roads to give you safe bike routes: Put in a start address and and end address and Ride the City will tell you how to get from point A to point B on a bike.

Things you can do with Ride the City:

• Begin/end by dragging and dropping the start/stop icons to the map, or entering an address for each
• Find a bike route that prioritizes bike lanes or is the most direct
• See the bike shops and click 'em to get store info (hours, location, website)
• Login for free to save routes and add points of interest
• Create a custom directions page to make it easier for bicyclists to find your business/event
• Embed Ride the City into your own website
• Use it on your mobile iPhone or Android devide
• Provide feedback

Ride the City is based on data that comes from Open Street Map, the volunteer effort to map the world. Why do we use a map that's not Google, you might ask? Open Street Map is free for everyone to use and doesn't have the restrictions with copyright that other companies, like Google or Mapquest impose whereas the public can freely use Open Street Map according to the Creative Commons license. With Open Street Map, anyone can contribute geographic information, like points of interest (museums, schools, bars) and lines (rivers, boundaries, streets, or bike paths). (To learn more about why Open Street Map exists, you can browse their FAQs here.)

For those who might be interested in editing Open Street Map, for example, to add missing bike lanes or to map a new suburb that may be missing, here's a short video that goes over the basics: youtube video. (If you want to learn more, feel free to read our FAQ.) There's a lot of missing data in Open Street Map - Eugene, including some new developments that haven't been mapped, like in the highlighted part of the image below: there should be streets (white lines) in that new suburb south of Barger Drive (bwn Terry/Candlelight).

(Note, this is an image of Open Street Map from Potlatch, Open Street Map's default editor. It looks a lot different from the Ride the City map but this is where our data comes from. The Ride the City map looks different because it's generated by Cloudmade, a provider of Open Street Map mapping tools. To see other Open Street Map-based applications, you can look through Cloudmade's Gallery of Apps.)

Ride the City - Eugene will continue to improve as more people add data to Open Street Map--adding bike lanes, making corrections (street names, directions of one-way streets, etc). It's a constantly evolving map!

We'd like to thank the volunteers who've contributed data to Open Street Map, especially those who've tested Ride the City and worked with us to improve the bicycle data over the last couple of months.

Ride safe!