Where did Ride the City get the data on streets, bike lanes, and greenways?
Every time you search Ride the City, we look through more than 125,000 records in a database. Most of that data comes from the City’s LION GIS data. The City’s LION file does not contain bicycle facility data, so we made a Freedom of Information Act request to the NYC Department of Transportation and NYC Department of City Planning. That got us a little closer, but we still had to put in dozens of hours of data cleanup to get everything working more-or-less correctly.
Every time you search Ride the City, we look through hundreds of thousands of records in a database. Most of that data comes from data that is free to the public, such as NYC’s LION GIS data. But LION data does not contain bicycle facility data, so we have to request for that from the municipality (sometimes through a Freedom of Information Act request), or we have to create it ourselves by transferring it from a printed bike map to Ride the City. On top of that work, we still have to put in dozens of hours of data cleanup to get everything working more-or-less correctly.
