Our twitter stream has been ringing off the hook here at Ride the City HQ. In case you somehow missed the news: Google has released its long-awaited bike routing application.

As cyclists, we're beaming right now thinking about the number of people who will use Google's familiar interface to plot their first bike commute. That's always been our #1 goal at Ride the City -- to encourage people to ride bikes by helping them find a safer route.

We want to congratulate the Google Maps team on what looks to be a job extraordinarily well done. As Vaidila can attest, merging bike path data layer with a street data layer in a major metropolitan area is a laborious, painstaking process. And as I can attest, adjusting the weights of a dozen different criteria that factor into the routing calculation is similarly challenging.