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New and improved bike routing, with low stress options

mapzen.com

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Re: New and improved bike routing, with low stress options

#61

Post by ficklepickle »

komali2 wrote: post #20
agumonkey wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Barely related but EV drivers also change their path. I don't have an EV (car or bike) don't really like driving in traffic (too chaotic for my brain) I often take smaller, slower roads where I just coast along smoothly. That said I wish I could try an ebike or even an EV.

Reminds me of how I had to take feeder roads and turn off the freeway during bad traffic when my shitty old toyota would overheat if I couldn't get good airflow into the radiator :P

Oh terrible flashback. I had an '87 Jetta with a similar propensity. Stuck in traffic in the summer, I had to run the heater on full. Brutal. Handy that the heater core is a mini-radiator, though.

Re: New and improved bike routing, with low stress options

#62

Post by aw3c2 »

brightball wrote: post #60

LeafletJS looks interesting there for the maps. Any experiences with it here? Does it work well with PostGIS?

Leaflet is for requesting and displaying raster tiles on the client. PostGIS is for storing and managing geo data. Leaflet and PostGIS do not talk to each other. Inbetween you need a tile renderer (like Mapnik).

Leaflet is a great library if you don't need much (use OpenLayers then).

Re: New and improved bike routing, with low stress options

#63

Post by novia »

Facemelters wrote: post #8
novia wrote: post #3

If use_roads is set to zero, will this optimize for roads that include sidewalks?

I'm guessing it will optimize for dedicated bike paths since you shouldn't be riding your bike on the sidewalk.

Where I am located it is legal, and honestly there is not much alternative.

The roads google maps instructs me to take for their bicycle directions are not bicycle friendly. I am directed to take a narrow road with just one lane on each side with motorists going 55 mph, even though there is heavy traffic and no room for motorists to safely pass.

It seems like google maps is optimizing for road incline instead of safety. I resorted to using their pedestrian routing to get a route with sidewalks, but of course then it doesn't take road incline into account. No E-bike here. And then oddly enough, the other day their pedestrian routing sent me through A CONSTRUCTION ZONE. That path was definitely not bike friendly or pedestrian friendly.

Google maps' bicycle directions never send me down a greenway, it always wants me to be right beside cars. If I have already biked 10 miles, you really don't want me to be right beside cars, as my bicycling becomes more unsteady as I become more tired.

Re: New and improved bike routing, with low stress options

#64

Post by icebraining »

MBlume wrote: post #23
Spivak wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we added bike lanes to sidewalks rather than roads I think it would solve a lot of the complaints motorists have.

We should take land away from motorists, not from pedestrians.

Yeah, but that's a separate matter, you can simply widen the sidewalk into the road to add the cycling lane.

Re: New and improved bike routing, with low stress options

#65

Post by MBlume »

icebraining wrote: post #64
MBlume wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should take land away from motorists, not from pedestrians.

Yeah, but that's a separate matter, you can simply widen the sidewalk into the road to add the cycling lane.

Yeah, sure, that's cool

Re: New and improved bike routing, with low stress options

#66

Post by awjr »

switch007 wrote: post #59
awjr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying an eBike is a lot about choosing the motor you want then hunting down a bike that uses the motor. I would strongly suggest that you buy from your local bike shop and buy the brand that the bike shop normally stocks. My pick was the Brose mid-drive motor available in Tour 50nm/City 75nm/MTB 90nm models. I then bought an ex-demo one off model from a localish bike shop. https://www.ebike-manufaktur.com/en/e-bikes…

What makes it worth 3100 EUR?? That's seems a lot of money even for an electric bike. (I'm guessing your ex-demo was a bit cheaper)

Cost me £1700 (about €2000). High-end Mid-drive motors pushing 75nm+ are expensive. Bosch Pro CX line and Shimano Steps are the other two types available. If you start looking around, you see the cheaper mid-drive, i.e. Bosch Active Line starting around £2000 and are suitable for lighter people. The high end motors are usually combined with high end parts and bigger batteries. Thus you end up with bikes costing between 3-4k.

It's saved me an absolute fortune. In fact after owning it for a month, my wife wrote off my car. We just took the insurance money and didn't buy another car going down to a one car family.

Re: New and improved bike routing, with low stress options

#67

Post by blt »

thisiscool wrote: post #35

What a great idea! I'm thinking how great this type of bike-optimized map on a dedicated bike gps unit would be.

I would buy this if it was significantly cheaper than a phone and made it easy to adjust those tuning parameters. I prefer to keep my phone protected on the bike in case of a collision / fall.

Re: New and improved bike routing, with low stress options

#68

Post by abalone »

I happen to know those intersections. They could have improved that wiggle route simply by rating the intersections. I'm not sure but it looks like they were not doing that.

The old route crossed two stop signs and did a left turn at a traffic signal. Left turns at traffic signals really suck.

The new, proper wiggle route is two left turns and a right turn, all at stop signs. Left turns at stop signs are not that much worse than going straight across -- and vastly better than a traffic light. Right turns are practically free.

So by simply rating the difficulty of intersections using a global metric, it seems like they could have made the same wiggle improvement without getting into rating each section of street. My point here is not that assessing things like accomodation_factor and road_stress are useless. Rather it appears that they've overlooked the much simpler, global improvement of rating intersections.

Re: New and improved bike routing, with low stress options

#69

Post by blt »

cjf101 wrote: post #24
baldfat wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember as a 12 year old a cop swore at me and told me he was going to take my bike if he saw me ride on the sidewalk again. So then 2 blocks later ANOTHER cop is swearing at me calling me crazy and going to drive me home for riding on the road when there was a sidewalk to ride on. I laughed and said the other one told me to get off the sidewalk. He called him and they got in an argument and hung up on him. I just…

Heh, that's awesome. I think it illustrates how confused people are in general about where bikes are supposed to be, which I think is a complicated cross of law, culture, cycling ability, and infrastructure. The police have never hassled me for being on any road on a bike. But man, do the dudes in pickup trucks with truck nuts love to tell me to get off the road.

Yeah, it even happened to me in progressive utopia Olympia, WA.

Re: New and improved bike routing, with low stress options

#70

Post by awjr »

jseliger wrote: post #42
OstrichGlue wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask what ebike you use?

Not the OP but I've heard good reviews of Karmic bikes: http://www.karmicbikes.com/shop/koben-s which are expensive but do "everything" and Propella bikes: http://www.propellabikes.com/ which are much less expensive but still supposed to be good.

I'd still go with whatever your local bike shop stocks. They do go wrong at some point and you will need a repair and even a courtesy bike while it gets repaired. Shipping a bike is not fun.
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