[deleted]
Apps for Bicycle Directions
61–70 of 111 posts
Re: Apps for Bicycle Directions
#62Any app that the majority of cyclists are using will win this battle. It's easy to map known bike trails, what's difficult is mapping a good road to bike on. There's so many factors that go into this, but the best and easiest way to get this data seems to be tracking what roads most cyclists are riding. This is exactly why strava heat map is the best for route planning IMHO. You can travel to any area and look at the heatmap surrounding you and instantly have an idea of what roads are heavy cycled.
Re: Apps for Bicycle Directions
#63In france, and in particular in Paris, https://www.geovelo.fr/ is very very good. It knows about various Parisian specialties (going the wrong way on residential street is allowed, temporary bike paths, mixed pedestrian/bike paths, etc) that other apps don't really understand. It also gives multiple paths depending on various criterion. OsmAnd is also decent. Google map is terribly bad.
Geovelo is indeed very practical in Paris! Well made and provides choice between "secure" and "fast" journeys, it also show how many % of the proposed paths are protected bike lanes and has shared information on hazards on the road!
Re: Apps for Bicycle Directions
#64Google Maps in Oakland took me straight up Fruitvale headed east....which, if you've ever biked it, is a disaster. Yes, it's a "bike lane", but it's shared with cars and suuuuper busy.
Google should be smart enough to know that there is co-mingled car/bike traffic and safely route my bike away from the cars.
Re: Apps for Bicycle Directions
#65For 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,…
Probably really depends on location. In Czechia the local alternative mapy.cz is vastly superior to Google Maps. It includes roads and trails that are not even drawn on Google Maps and the maps contain much more information in overall.
Re: Apps for Bicycle Directions
#66Citymapper 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 know you probably mean road cyclists, but I haven't seen Trailforks mentioned. Nothing beats it for singletrack route planning. Komoot is good too, but at least in my area of NA the elevation calculation is off by quite a bit. When I've used it for longer routes, I've ended up putting in at least 1,000 ft more of climbing than it has told me would be on the route. Trailforks doesn't have that problem. If you have a…
I've liked Komoot quite a bit for planning longer road bike loops in or near the city — surprised it hasn't taken off more but I suppose it's a pretty niche market. Integrates wirelessly with Wahoo bike computers (suck it Garmin haha) and is free for your local region too.
Re: Apps for Bicycle Directions
#67For 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,…
Google Maps consistently provides cycling directions that go the wrong way on one-way streets. This is unacceptable given that cycling the wrong way is illegal and dangerous.
What country? In many countries cycling again traffic on one-way roads is actually legal.
Re: Apps for Bicycle Directions
#68Any app that the majority of cyclists are using will win this battle. It's easy to map known bike trails, what's difficult is mapping a good road to bike on. There's so many factors that go into this, but the best and easiest way to get this data seems to be tracking what roads most cyclists are riding. This is exactly why strava heat map is the best for route planning IMHO. You can travel to any area and look at the…
Strava is often unideal for touring, because its recommended routes are where all the local sports cyclists are forced to go due to their thin little tires and lust for speed. Tourers might have thicker tires and so be comfortabke with less smooth roads if it means avoiding cars.
Re: Apps for Bicycle Directions
#69It would be nice if in addition to free, it mentioned whether or not the app was FOSS. When I was searching a couple of years ago, there were no open source bike tracking android apps, and most of the "free" ones were trialware that popped up a subscription screen as soon as you tried to do anything complicated. Also, I love the use of the tag in this article.
Even two years ago, OSMAnd and Brouter were open source and available from the F-Droid repository.
Re: Apps for Bicycle Directions
#70I 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 had to go straight, but it told me to turn right and then immediately turn left. This happened when the bike path took a slight turn before the intersection, e.g. to guide you towards pedestrian traffic lights. Not sure which one of the two apps is to blame here.
Oh and when I tried Google Maps for a bit, to find my accommodation, it immediately tried to guide me through the middle of a field, with no discernible path whatsoever. So much for that..