Ride the City co-creator Jordan Anderson bikes through Prospect Park. Vaidila Kungys

While studying to become city planners at New York University in 2003, Vaidila Kungys and Jordan Anderson wanted to explore the city by bike, but neither knew the streets that well. Anderson got clipped by a cab on one outing and grew tired of pulling paper maps out of his backpack and finding them a disheveled mess. Kungys, a former competitive rider, did a better job navigating the moving obstacles and tight spaces of the city's streets, but learning the best bike routes was a different matter.

After hearing similar stories from their fellow bikers, the friends came up with an idea: How about a HopStop for cyclists?

HopStop is a popular website that tells you how to get from Point A to Point B in New York City and other major metro areas using buses, trains, and subways. Kungys and Anderson thought it would be the perfect tool to find maps of popular bike routes and learn about New York's growing network of bike lanes. But HopStop's creators turned down the idea.

So the friends decided to build their own site, and in 2008, Ride the City debuted. It was a hit with urban cyclists and soon expanded to Chicago and Austin. Today, Ride the City offers bike maps in nine North American cities, with more planned. (Bikers and city officials around the world have put in requests.) The website has 46,500 monthly users and recently launched a version for the iPhone that made Apple's list of "hot apps" when it debuted in April.

May is Bike Month in New York City and nationwide, and Friday is National Bike to Work Day, so a lot of new people might be looking for routes to work. Ride the City's goal is to make it easier for them -- riders can plug in their starting point and destination, and the site will plot a route. Users can choose whether they prefer the most direct route through city traffic, or the safest one.

Anderson and Kungys built their site at the same time that New York City officials were working to make the metropolis more friendly to bikers and pedestrians, part of an overall environmental and transportation strategy designed to provide alternatives to driving and cut down on pollution. Those efforts have included protected bike lanes on busy thoroughfares and closing off parts of Time Square to vehicular traffic. It's worked, according to a recent study by the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, which says the number of daily riders in the city has grown from 73,000 in 2003 to 201,000 this year.

"Every time you're walking to work, you're noticing more and more bike racks, you're noticing more and more bike lanes, which kind of gets you in the mindset that, ‘Hey, the city is actually making a space for bikes,'" Anderson says. "I think Ride the City is a small part of that. It's a nice part of that."

Kungys is originally from Eugene, Oregon, and Anderson grew up in Montana. Biking in their hometowns was nothing like biking in New York City. Even while living in Chicago, Anderson didn't have the same kind of near misses that can be routine on New York streets.

"In Chicago, I never even got close to be hitting by a car," he says. "It's amazingly easy to get around by bike. I got here to New York and I'm like, ‘Man, this place is crazy.' I jumped on my bike and I rode around, and I always felt like I was kind of taking my life in my hands."

Kungys (right) was more comfortable dodging and weaving through New York traffic because he once trained to race bikes as part of the U.S. national team. As a teen-ager, he lived at the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs, dreaming of gold medals. But one day, talking to a fellow racer about the endless, grueling cycle of training and competition, he started to realize that he didn't want to "sit on a bike my whole life." Over time, he decided that the pursuit of Olympic gold took too much time away from other goals.

He quit, but he never lost his passion for cycling; he just didn't want to make it his only one.

Now Kungys helps others ride safely instead. He and Anderson are now urban planners; Anderson is in private practice; Kungys works for the city. But they'll often put in an extra 20 hours a week on their website. Kungys will sometimes look out the window and watch as folks bike to the park while he's inside helping them plot better routes.

"There's a quirky irony" in that, he acknowledges, but he's not worried about burning out like he did on the national team. "Number one, this isn't about me. Cycling was just about me getting better for myself. This is about making it easier for other people to get around. To get other people who may never have been on a bike (to ride)."

Despite new competition from Google Maps, which launched its own bike route-plotting option in March, Anderson and Kungys feel confident that their creation, with a two-year head start, has built a place for itself in the biking community. Ride the City works in part by relying on user feedback, as well as data from OpenStreetMap, a volunteer community mapping project. Riders can rate stops along the way and remove or add routes according to their preference. Media outlets in Austin, Texas, and Louisville, Kentucky, compared the site to Google's directions and found Ride the City's advice more helpful.

"One of the great things about (Ride the City) is the crowd sourcing aspect," says Wiley Norvell with Transportation Alternatives in New York City. "The more cyclists choose and recommend specific routes, the more commonly those routes are recommended to everyone else. This isn't just two guys looking at a map. It has the benefits of tens of thousands of cyclists who are out there, being the eyes and ears of it."

Years after giving up his Olympic dream, Kungys is glad to have something new to drive him -- something that also contributes to his community.

"When I work hard and don't sleep enough and am tired," Kungys says, "I still get energy from it, because I realize we are helping people. We're helping people ride their bikes."