biking around NYC just got waaay easier

Cary alerted me to Ride the City. It attempts to give me what I’ve craved for as long as I’ve been riding a bike in NYC: Safe biking directions.

Given a beginning and ending address, it will give you a route that is (by default) biased towards bikeways and bike lanes. You can pick between {safe route, safer route, and shortest route}. The directions are generally pretty good, and hopefully they’ll get better soon. I think it’s still lacking some features:

• Route dragging. Google maps supports altering driving directions by dragging a point along the route; this site should too.
• Waypoints.
• Integration with actual statistics on the most dangerous intersections would be pretty cool also. That way it wouldn’t have to treat all non-bikelane-endowed streets the same and could help reduce the number of incidents.