This guest blog post is brought to you by Erik Carlson.

Ride the City Twin Cities has launched! Yes my two-wheeled friends you have a new way of navigating the best bike city in the good ol' U.S. of A. What's more, Ride the City launched on the summer solstice. Warm weather, more than 15.5 hours of sunlight, and great bike routes... cue hallelujah chorus!

Months ago I suggested to Vaidila at Ride the City that we needed a Ride the City Minneapolis/St. Paul. Then he went off and launched in Zaragoza, Spain. I am sure the kind and generous people of Zaragoza are well deserving recipients of a Ride the City site. But we ride our bikes in snow! Isn't that worth something? Regardless, my lobbying efforts needed to increase. Fortunately, this was nothing a snow ball to the back of the head couldn't fix. I would like to extend a hearty handshake to Vaidila Kungys (the orchestrator), Jordan Anderson (the mastermind) and Natalie (bike shop researcher) for all their great work!

I hope you appreciate Ride the City as much as I do. It's full of a bunch of great features. For one, it's easy and quick to use. Drag and drop the little green bike man and stop sign and you're done. A pull-down menu allows you to adjust how safe or direct your route is. Have you ever been on your bike and not sure the best way to go? Ride the City is available for Android devices and iPhones. Ride the City also has the same clean interface for lots of cities I visit so I know what I am doing right away. More cities are coming on line all the time. The Ride the City maps are based on Open Street Map (OSM), a wiki map that is constantly being updated by an army of people across the globe. You can try editing Open Street Map yourself, it's easy. Here's a video that Vaidila put together that gives you an overview of Ride the City and OSM. With lots of people editing the map, it's easy to keep up to date.

The next time you are trying to find the best way from point A to B on a bike, give Ride the City a try. If you want to bookmark the site, just use http://ridethecity.com/minneapolis or http://ridethecity.com/stpaul (regardless of which twin city you choose, Ride the City will route you between the two).

Photo credit: City of Minneapolis