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For years, biking has been a supporting actor within our app. Now, its face is on the movie poster.
Bikes are great — they’re cheap, fast, and infinitely rideable. They also make public transit better: whether you’re taking a Citi Bike to speed up your walk home from the subway, or opting for a two-wheeled commute when the bus isn’t an option.
But not everyone feels safe riding. Whether you’re riding for the first time, heading somewhere new, or looking for better alternatives to the worn-and-weary path… everybody needs some help finding the best, calmest, least car-infested streets to feel safe. Now, our app can help transit riders become bike riders, too, by showing which routes in your city are actually safe to ride.
We know “safe” is a subjective word. When we tried to establish what a “safe” road was, it set off a philosophical rap battle in the office. Eventually we landed on a practical definition: would you recommend it for someone’s first-ever bike ride?
With that in mind, we designed our bike routing algorithm around four safety principles:
1. Seek protected bike infrastructure first, obviously.
It doesn’t matter if the barrier is trees, concrete, or a line of parked cars. When there’s physical protection between you and traffic, you don’t have to worry about getting buzzed by a truck. Our trip planner prioritizes these roads, even if the route ends up being a bit longer.
2. Paint is not infrastructure.
Painted lanes are practically useless as deterrents for cars. You wouldn’t want to ride in a car sewer filled with parked delivery trucks and swinging doors — which is why we don’t want to route you there. When all road conditions are equal, our routing algorithm has a negligible preference for roads with painted bike lanes or shared lane markings.
3. When there’s no protected bikeway? Take a low-traffic street.
The types of street we ride on have a HUGE impact on how safe we feel. Nobody wants to ride on a fast six-lane boulevard. A low speed, one-way residential street is usually not so bad. Until protected bike infrastructure exists everywhere, these streets are our fallback.
4. When there’s no way to avoid a busy street, make it obvious.
Sometimes busy streets are unavoidable for a particular trip. Rather than obscuring the safety hazard, or hiding the trip completely, we help you make an informed choice on whether a bike is the right tool for the job.
Now when you plan a bike trip, our routing algorithm will show you up to the three best options — or, if there aren’t many bikeways available, three of the least bad ones.
We’ll tell you exactly what percentage is along safe routes, flag busy sections, and show you the elevation profile too. And don’t worry, our routing algorithm puts safety first, but it’s also optimized for flatness. No detours through the mountains — apologies to our polka dot jersey friends!
Turn-by-turn navigation
Alright, great. We’ve found you a safer bike route. But how can we make those trip plans easier to follow once you’re actually on the bike?!
Enter our GO navigation team: they’ve perfected the art of turn-by-turn directions. Just look at this beauty:
We’ll guide you each step of the way. Just mount your phone on your handlebars to get started. Need to put your phone in your pocket during your trip? We’ll send you a notification right on your lock screen, ready for a glance at the next red light.
Once your trip is over, we’ll prompt you for a trip rating. With that data, we can make improvements to our bike routing in future updates. Eventually, we’ll work with cities to help make improvements to their bike networks, too — something we already do for public transit.
Just like with transit trip planning, we’ve also made sure that you can plan bike trips when you’re offline. We’ll autosave your city’s biking network to your phone in tiny files, and calculate your best route without data.
And before you ask…. voice notifications are coming soon. How soon? Soon!
Custom-fitted to your riding style
E-bike? Road bike? Sixty-pound Dutch bike? Our app has your back, even if gravity doesn’t. Tap your emoji on the homescreen to open your ✨ all new profile page ✨ .
You can customize your bike (and walking!) speeds based on your fitness, the bulkiness of your rig, and whether or not you go electric like Dylan. You can also customize your commuting preferences for biking vs. transit.
Bike everywhere all the time? Move our slider all the way to the right and Transit will always show bike directions before transit.
Don’t care about bikes at all and have no idea why you’ve read this much of our blog post? Swing it all the way to the left and keep riding those buses.
Mobilizing for better bike infra
We’ve gotten better at finding safe bike routes. But the quality of our routes is limited by the quality of your city’s bike infrastructure. How do we make that infrastructure better? It doesn’t fall from the sky from benevolent bike storks.
It requires grassroots organizing, political savvy, and the bravery to confront the car-addicted status quo. Through partnerships with local advocates, we regularly prompt Transit’s millions of riders to take action when their city’s transportation infrastructure is at stake.
This type of on-the-ground, grind-it-out work really does make our cities better.
Here in Montreal, we’ve seen what happens when a city rallies for better bike infrastructure — and wins. What was once considered a sport for death-defying bike messengers and intrepid eco-warriors is now a completely normalized way of getting around.
We’ve got a LONG way to go. But if Montreal can go from this…
to this…
…so can any city.