Comment by ollybee
1 year ago
What I really want form a bike route planner is a map style that shows smaller roads as you zoom out. When planning a cycling I'm interested in tiny back back roads but they are hidden as soon as I zoom out on any map enough to be useful for route planning.
Not sure if you're looking for paved or unpaved backroads, but if it's the latter I recently shipped a feature at my day job (https://ridewithgps.com) that highlights all unpaved backroads, visible up to zoom level 8 (above zoom 8 we start running into tile size/data limitations).
May be useful to you or others in this thread. We lean pretty heavily into the "cycling power user" market segment, the feature set isn't always the most discoverable but it's quite comprehensive if you put in the up-front time to learn the tooling (similar to a lot of other specialty mapping apps out there - caltopo, fatmap (rip) etc)
A subscription? $10 a month?? That's the cost of a music streaming service!!
I'd spend up to a $100 once on a killer tool that meets all my needs in this space.
This subscription first crap is way out of hand.
Except that if you're a serious cyclist, spending $10/month on a really good road mapping service is worth more to you than spending $10/month on a music streaming service (or 2 coffees at Starbucks).
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Since this is getting downvoted, I'd sure like to hear why you think an app like this justifies a $10/mo sub.
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cycle.travel (my site) aims to do that - the advantage of developing your own cartography! Minor roads in rural areas are shown earlier than in most other styles, but in urban areas they kick in later to avoid cluttering the map too much.
Just wanted to pop in and let you know I use your site all the time and it's still the best (and I've tried everything) at creating routes to avoid dangerous roads. Thank you for the awesome app.
One little feature that's great is the quick link to view Google Streetview images, and the only thing I'd change is to have it let me do that anywhere on the map (not just on the route) so that I can look at alternatives without dragging the route there first.
It's a good app, I was happy to subscribe once I used it a couple of times to find new routes about the city.
is that your site? I love it! I used it on an 800 mile bike ride 2 years go.
Wow, first bike router that chooses the same route I would to and from work. The others all take the steepest hill in the area instead of the slightly longer around the hill.
OpenTopoMap is what solves that issue for me. The contrast on that map is excellent.
It's a mostly a style for OSM with hillshading applied. The Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg is hosting a web-based "preview" of it at https://opentopomap.org. https://brouter.de/brouter-web and https://bikerouter.de also have it as a selectable map layer, and it can also be added to OsmAnd.
This is sort of what the Strava "heatmap" map is when you switch it to cycling mode: https://www.strava.com/maps/global-heatmap?sport=Ride&style=....
Yep. This is the a crucial cycling feature that's missing.
Ideally, I'd also like to highlight roads with diverters, circles, chicanes, bumps, tables, etc.
In OpenStreetMap, which is the data source used by most of these navigation apps, the relevant key is traffic_calming.
I have not found any navigation app that preferentially chooses streets with traffic_calming features, such as speed humps. I recently suggested that in OSMAnd and got no traction [0].
[0] https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues/21320
Have you tried https://brouter.de/ ? If that feature is neither supported here, it worth trying to request it.
Interesting - I'd love to know more about this, and perhaps assist with the data model.
While purpose-built traffic calming infra is super nice to have, I'm somewhat more interested in the much more prevalent (at least, outside Europe and Asia) and also muc less expensive roadways which are traffic-calm by default, owing to natural chicanes, unimproved areas, one-lane bridges, etc.
Bogota, for example, has a fairly elegant network of unimproved roads connecting the parks. If you take a ride with a local, you see the bike infra much more acutely than what is expressed on gmaps, or even theoretically by looking at `traffic_calming==true`. A much more granular data type is required.