81–90 of 111 posts
I wrote this blog post as I'm often asked for a safe cycle route somewhere - hopefully you find this useful :D
Thanks for the post. I'm a big osmand user, but have never tried BRouter. Is it significantly better than the built in routing?
Every app I have tried is inadequate. Sometimes the best route is going the wrong way on a quite residential street - of course apps don't condone this. Google Maps lets you plan the route on your larger desktop screen then send to phone - nice feature - but then its planning is weird - even when I ask for a bike route and turn on the bike layer it doesn't follow it. It needs options to let you go bike paths vs dista…
I recently used openrouteservice [1] for a trip from Bremen to Berlin (~400km) and it worked pretty well. It even lets you choose between different types of bikes (road, MTB). I downloaded the GPX into OsmAnd on my phone for turn-by-turn directions. OsmAnd also does a decent job of guiding you back onto your predefined route. One thing that was a bit irritating was the directions at intersections, where you clearly h…
It's your workflow that's to blame: using a GPX erases that information. If you'd planned the route in OSMAnd it would have been able to give you more road-layout-aware navigation.
For the most part, city riding is pretty well served by Google maps IMO. A few years ago, following Google maps cycling directions me and a couple of friends on road bikes were led through muddy forest trails, old rail road tracks and green lanes on a London -> Paris The difficulty with cycling directions is that there's not a 1 size fits all solution, a roadie needs smooth road but would prefer it quiet and scenic,…
Each city has different topography, traffic, weather, bike lanes, bike culture, helmets laws, side walk riding laws, common type of bikes etc.
A woman taking her kids to day care in Tokyo will probably ride on the sidewalk without an helmet on electric bike with two toddler sits. A guy riding to work in Sydney might come from a remote suburb on a sporty road bike where he can only ride on the road with the occasional bike lane in the inner city.
It is a completely different experience and require different type of routes. A good application needs to take into account all those parameters and deduct some optimal route. It is not that simple.
Any suggestions for ebike-friendly bike directions? Less need to route around hills and more accurate journey time estimates would be useful.
I know the company has had some difficulties as of late, but I’ve found Strava to be quite effective for route planning. Mostly because it can route you according to “popularity”, so it’ll put you on roads that other Strava users regularly ride on. This is great for a lot of cases, although sometimes it’ll pick a road that’s great for road biking on the weekend but not so great for commuting on weekdays. I wonder if…
> I wonder if Strava could create two heat maps based on what I imagine are the two big clusters on their user base: road bikes and casual commuter cyclists. I want this really badly. Around me (North Germany) the cycling infrastructure is great for the casual commuter, but the quality of paths for road bikes varies dramatically - some bike paths are beautifully smooth and wide, whilst others are bumpy/gravelly and t…
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bicycle https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:surface
OsmAnd will show you the surface types along a route as you're planning, and you can adjust which surfaces you'd like to cycle on!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's a "real" cyclist? Someone who rides for sport in full kit and trains for races? Someone who commutes to work and runs errands in street clothes, even in bad weather, maybe because they don't have another option? A casual weekend family rider on rails-to-trails? Someone on a cross-country tour?
Anything but the first ;-). English needs a separate term for the first, as Dutch has ( https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/lycra-on-the-s... ) Also relevant to your excellent remark is https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200724-will-covid-19-... .
I'm curious is there something like OSM but for directions using public transit? Some public repository of bus and train times.
Citymapper is a limited amount of cities. What do "real" cyclists use? I get the feeling they use a garmin-like gps devices made for cycling? In the past, I've tried to plan a route in google maps (for just driving), but once you import and try to use it, it recalculates your route.
I don't own a car and cycle everywhere in my city. On a $300 bike with a milk crate lashed to the rear rack it came with because I really don't want to worry about locking up something pricier, or worry about destroying it on the many pothole. I just use Google Maps's cycling directions, combined with my own mental map of things like "tree coverage" which is kind of important for avoiding heatstroke in a tropical cit…
Citymapper and OsmAnd are brilliant for this!
Also +1 on milk crates strapped to the back, I do that too and they're great for groceries :D
For the most part, city riding is pretty well served by Google maps IMO. A few years ago, following Google maps cycling directions me and a couple of friends on road bikes were led through muddy forest trails, old rail road tracks and green lanes on a London -> Paris The difficulty with cycling directions is that there's not a 1 size fits all solution, a roadie needs smooth road but would prefer it quiet and scenic,…
> A few years ago, following Google maps cycling directions me and a couple of friends on road bikes were led through muddy forest trails, old rail road tracks and green lanes on a London -> Paris Yep. It's clear that Google Maps optimises for city riding and that's cool, but it does fall down badly on longer tours. To a large degree this is inevitable - only OSM actually has the level of surface quality information…