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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

#81
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)

High-end non-electric bikes are in a similar price range...

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

#82
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask what ebike you use?

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…

I don't have an e-bike, but a friend got one. In addition to the motor, his advice was that you should choose the control system. There's a small handful of companies that make the controls, and his impression was that he preferred the behavior of one particular brand over the others.

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

#83
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The routing engine in general is available as an option at openstreetmap.org: http://www.openstreetmap.org/directions?engine=mapzen_bicycl... I checked the request, the JS powering the OSM feature isn't sending the parameters so they are probably the 0.25 defaults there.

Wow, first thing I noticed using MapZen is it sends me over a heavily trafficked freeway overpass to my office... when a detour of only a few hundred feet has me going over a very pleasant bike bridge DIRECTLY into my office parking lot. Will have to check out of the rest of the route vs what Google Maps has me doing now, though. I'm pretty happy with the current route but I'm new to this job so I've got a lot of rou…

Is the bridge mapped on OpenStreetMap?

In the case that it is, there could be some data error that breaks routing across it.

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

#85
post #3

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

Likely not as many (most?) sidewalks aren't officially open to bikes (Regardless of enforcement on the one hand and regardless of some people preferring to use them on the other).

It really varies by the city. Some prohibit bikes on sidewalks, others allow them at least in some areas, and some only allow children under a certain age. There's no consistency.

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

#86
post #3

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

Hi! I'm with Mapzen. Setting `use_roads` to zero means a preference for using roads tagged in OpenStreetMap that have bike infrastructure, as opposed to roads without bike lanes. We don't route on sidewalks, and will avoid paths that are tagged `bicycle=no`. You can get a sense of these on our bike map. https://mapzen.com/bikes/

Have you considered using data from the California Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System (SWITRS) in your routing algorithm? You can filter traffic collisions for those involving bicycles in order to identify roads or intersections particularly dangerous for cyclists.

http://iswitrs.chp.ca.gov/Reports/jsp/userLogin.jsp

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

#87
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"mechanical sympathy"

It is amazing how folks have to plan when their vehicle is ‘non-optimal’. For the almost opposite effect, I had a Ford Ranger (passed unwillingly to me) that even with 700lbs of weight on the back axle and good winter (non-stud) tires sucked in winter. I was very careful about my route anywhere.

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

#88

So I decided to see how to get to that nice Pho place across town .. 600 Washington Ave Philadelphia, PA 19147 or the one next door at 610 Washington Ave Philadelphia, PA 19147 .. in both cases it truncates off the street number and drops me at a wrong location. Does that mean OpenStreetMap needs some assistance in that area? Even stranger if I put one of those addresses in both source and destination it does a stran…

Yeah, address coverage and POI coverage are pretty spotty. The address would show on osm.org if it were in the data: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/39.93668/-75.16656

Google seems to only have gotten the address coverage it has by sending vans around with cameras and then making people type in the addresses for CAPTCHAs

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

#89
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, address coverage and POI coverage are pretty spotty. The address would show on osm.org if it were in the data: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/39.93668/-75.16656

Google seems to only have gotten the address coverage it has by sending vans around with cameras and then making people type in the addresses for CAPTCHAs

There is also a lot of data that has been collected by governments:

http://results.openaddresses.io/

There's a variety of reasons that such data hasn't made it to OSM (resources, licensing issues, disagreement about how it should be integrated, disagreement about whether it should be integrated, etc.)

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

#90
post #84

A friend has been working on a similar project for a while that allowed the rider to tailor, in great detail, the kind of route required. The algorithms involved are pretty interesting! http://zikes.website

That's really cool.

Any chance it might eventually allow users to specify a single start/end point and a desired distance? That'd be much more useful for people who ride for sport, and even though there seem to be a few websites that generate such looped routes, they don't appear to do it particularly well.

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