Comment by andalinmicphew
1 day ago
Checkout https://bikehopper.org for solid elevation, bike infrastructure and transit-aware routing around the Bay Area. Some friends and I built this about 5 years ago and continue to maintain it. We use 1m DTM elevation data for SF and 50m for rural areas. DTM is a must for elevation based routing in SF as there are so many sizable buildings, large trees the other models fail hard.
Very Cool. Thanks for making it!
I've checked out a few bike mapping apps recently and one feature I found absolutely invaluable was grade indications like http://hillmapper.com (which unfortunately seems unmaintained.)
Google Maps elevation diagrams comparing the various selected routes are nice but they do not do a good job of highlighting extreme grades. I feel like you actually want to graph the change in elevation rather than the elevation itself.
Using a route I cycled the other day (near Mission Bernal Safeway to near Diamond Heights Safeway). I think the routing may overweight bike lanes too much. For instance it will go four blocks by shared street and bike lane to avoid the two blocks on Clipper between Sanchez and Castro which are not a bike lane.
On my heavy cargo e-bike I've found there is quite a non-linear difference as the grade increases. 12% and I'll work a bit but be fine. 22% (the route Google Maps sent me...) and I'll all but collapse after a block.
Hillmapper falling apart was one of the main reasons we prioritized getting good elevation data into our router. We include steepness indicators for steep blocks and an elevation overview of the full trip and have found that combo to serve us well.
Getting between those two Safeways is rough. Bikehopper fails, it suggests the harry street steps; a non-starter for most. I’ll try to fix it. I definitely agree that grade is non-linear. We use accelerating weighting for grade so a hill that is twice as steep is more than twice as “discouraged” by the routing engine.
For bike routing I think e-bikes need a separate profile from acoustic bikes. Hill matter less and stairs are totally out of the question (this is important for routing in and out of transit centers).
> acoustic bike.
I’m a cyclist - thought I knew the terms.
‘Acoustic bike means a bike without an electric assist. So, a "normal" bike. I know the Path Less Pedaled youtube channel has used this term for at least a couple of years, though I don't think that's necessarily the originator. It's a play on electric/acoustic guitars.’
https://www.reddit.com/r/cycling/comments/14wwx0t/whats_an_a...
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The specific route suggested varies a bit depending on where you move the starting point. Closer to Sanchez St it does a better (albeit not perfect) job than google maps.
I guess as a cyclist in SF I’m not necessarily looking for the routing to be perfect but I am looking to see the information that matters so I can understand how appropriate the suggested routing is.
Agree that e-bike and acoustic bike riders probably do have slightly different sets of preferences. A big one for me is that I’m ok with 4 way stops every block on slow streets on an e-bike but on an acoustic bike they’d drive me nuts.
Can you please consider expanding it to include Seattle? Or better yet Puget Sound area? 1m DTM elevation data is available here. We have many amazing bike trails, but also plenty of hills that must be avoided.
Check out Modemix (modemix.io)
It's available in Seattle
Modemix is solid. Same goal as bikehopper and lots of active dev. We (bikehopper devs) know the modemix dev. Good guy, solid app. I think the Modemix hill data isn’t as detailed as what we use for SF.
We’d like too! It’s an open source project that was never designed to scale beyond one regions (bay area, puget sound, NYC, etc…) our hope has always been been that folks in different regions would spin up their own copy. By keeping it regional the data and hardware requirements for running it are minimal. That said, we are working on a new routing engine that we hope can scale to support continent wide routing. Then we can manage running it for many metro’s. If you’re interested in self hosting for Seattle we are happy to help get it set up.
What are the system requirements for hosting it? I'm not sure I have the discretionary funds to host it for the general public - but it all depends on how heavy this is :)
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In the meantime, you can check out maps.earth, which has bike+transit directions for the puget sound area (also sfbay, los angeles, portland)
...though the elevation model I'm currently using is courser (~30m, from Mapzen skadi). This is a good reminder to fix that where available!
Hit me up if you want to use the iOS beta which has some nice transit features (already available on the web).
Nice! I’m always exciting to try a new non-car centric mapping/routing app.
Would a DSM not be preferable to a DTM? Or is that you reference with regards to large trees?
DSM includes buildings and trees. So the DSM from SRTM data makes market street in S.F. look like a series of very steep hills and valleys because some of the datapoints are street level while others are the roofs of skyscrapers. DTM removes the buildings resulting in a map much closer to what we think of from the ground.
It's interesting (and unsurprising I guess) to see that bike lanes in the US are much like those in the UK - a line on the road, rather than real segmentation.
They are a real segmentation in some places but as you can probably guess that is few and far between. A line on the road is also in the minority with the rest being nothing at all.