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cycle.travel's my project - thanks for the mention! Always happy to hear suggestions and ideas. It uses OpenStreetMap data plus a heavily customised instance o

cycle.travel's my project - thanks for the mention! Always happy to hear suggestions and ideas. It uses OpenStreetMap data plus a heavily customised instance of OSRM (Open Source Routing Machine, a fast routeplanning engine). The routing "profile", which calculates the weighting, is a few thousand lines of code alone, never mind various other stuff like custom elevation calculations. It's a great project to work on, and the best reward of all is when people plan multi-day tours with it and say how much they've enjoyed the route.

jswag 7y ago
Bookmarked! While it seemed unable to locate my home address for some reason, when I manually dragged the pin it planned a route from my work to my home nearly identical to the one it took me several weeks of harrowing journeys with Google Maps and looking at PDFs of bike routes to find. This will DEFINITELY come in handy in the future!
ccvannorman 7y ago
cycle.travel does not work on iOS. Loaded page, green popup, Starting from: cycling to: I filled these out and pressed Find Route, nothing happens. Tried selecting Circular route, press Find Route, nothing happens
- Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
  Curious - works for me but would like to debug! Could you ping me the start/end points you're entering? (info@cycle.travel if you don't want to post them here.)
  - soperj 7y ago
    same thing happened to me on the home page (linux, firefox 66), but the actual map pages works great.
- Poiesis 7y ago
  Works for me on iOS 13.4. Even have 1Blocker installed; didn't have to disable. Edit: This looks pretty great, but I should probably point out that it turned my 5.5 mile commute into a 8.5 mile one. Realize it's probably trying to avoid larger streets; Hope this is or becomes configurable.
  - Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
    Glad you like it! It does optimise for low (motor) traffic routes. But you'll see that there's a little "Any road/Paved only" toggle - currently the latter just filters out unpaved roads/paths, but my medium-term ambition is for it to be a bit more blasé on city streets too.
bengerbil 7y ago
It generates a ~10km route in my Canadian city that starts off in meters, and switches to miles. I know we're somewhat used to flipping between metric and imperial, but it's not a common thing to do mid-trip.
- Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
  So I’m genuinely interested - what would you expect? I was born in Britain in the mid-70s and miles and metres, though an unconventional combination, is what I grew up with. But I realise not everywhere has the same weird combination of metric and imperial as we do. What would make sense to you from a North American viewpoint? Edit: Thanks everyone for the feedback! Just pushed a quick fix: - USA now defaults to miles & feet - Canada and Mexico now default to km & metres - Britain defaults to miles & metres (as before, yes we're weird) - mainland Europe, Australia and NZ default to km & metres (as before)
  - Rebelgecko 7y ago
    As an American, the mix of meters and miles really threw me off. When it said "40m" and "5mi" I thought it was switching between estimated travel time and distance. For me, it would be better if it was consistent with the measurement system (using miles and feet, OR meters and km).
  - Mogzol 7y ago
    In Canada distances are almost always in meters/kilometers. For US I assume they would want feet/miles.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    Not the OP, but probably picking one unit at the start and sticking with it.
    - dmurray 7y ago
      So "6 miles" and "0.04 miles"? I don't think that's the most understandable for anyone.
Vinnl 7y ago
Thanks for cycle.travel :) I probably found out about it in a different comment section as well.
tasuki 7y ago
This is great - bookmarked! I see that while it does try to avoid busy roads, it often takes the road that's right next to the motorway (even when not strictly necessary - probably because it's shorter and has little traffic). It'd be better to prefer roads that are further from busy roads. I understand that's very hand-wavey and probably super tricky to implement.
- Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
  It would! As you say, roads (or cycleways) beside motorways are usually short, have little traffic, gentle gradients and often a prized position in a valley rather than lumbering up a hillside. Ideal cycle routes... apart from the motorway a few metres (/feet) away. I've got a page of notes on possible ways of fixing this - it is a hard problem. One possibility I'm toying with is a massive grid of "scenic value" for (say) each 0.01° x 0.01° square, so I could downrate the surroundings of motorways and uprate routes through (say) national parks.
  - tasuki 7y ago
    Calculating "scenic value" sounds like a very good idea indeed! Plus points for points of interest and greenery, minus points for busy roads. Again, I understand it's not easy to implement :)

jswag 7y ago

Bookmarked! While it seemed unable to locate my home address for some reason, when I manually dragged the pin it planned a route from my work to my home nearly identical to the one it took me several weeks of harrowing journeys with Google Maps and looking at PDFs of bike routes to find. This will DEFINITELY come in handy in the future!

ccvannorman 7y ago

cycle.travel does not work on iOS. Loaded page, green popup, Starting from: cycling to: I filled these out and pressed Find Route, nothing happens. Tried selecting Circular route, press Find Route, nothing happens

Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
Curious - works for me but would like to debug! Could you ping me the start/end points you're entering? (info@cycle.travel if you don't want to post them here.)
- soperj 7y ago
  same thing happened to me on the home page (linux, firefox 66), but the actual map pages works great.
Poiesis 7y ago
Works for me on iOS 13.4. Even have 1Blocker installed; didn't have to disable. Edit: This looks pretty great, but I should probably point out that it turned my 5.5 mile commute into a 8.5 mile one. Realize it's probably trying to avoid larger streets; Hope this is or becomes configurable.
- Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
  Glad you like it! It does optimise for low (motor) traffic routes. But you'll see that there's a little "Any road/Paved only" toggle - currently the latter just filters out unpaved roads/paths, but my medium-term ambition is for it to be a bit more blasé on city streets too.

bengerbil 7y ago

It generates a ~10km route in my Canadian city that starts off in meters, and switches to miles. I know we're somewhat used to flipping between metric and imperial, but it's not a common thing to do mid-trip.

Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
So I’m genuinely interested - what would you expect? I was born in Britain in the mid-70s and miles and metres, though an unconventional combination, is what I grew up with. But I realise not everywhere has the same weird combination of metric and imperial as we do. What would make sense to you from a North American viewpoint? Edit: Thanks everyone for the feedback! Just pushed a quick fix: - USA now defaults to miles & feet - Canada and Mexico now default to km & metres - Britain defaults to miles & metres (as before, yes we're weird) - mainland Europe, Australia and NZ default to km & metres (as before)
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  As an American, the mix of meters and miles really threw me off. When it said "40m" and "5mi" I thought it was switching between estimated travel time and distance. For me, it would be better if it was consistent with the measurement system (using miles and feet, OR meters and km).
- Mogzol 7y ago
  In Canada distances are almost always in meters/kilometers. For US I assume they would want feet/miles.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  Not the OP, but probably picking one unit at the start and sticking with it.
  - dmurray 7y ago
    So "6 miles" and "0.04 miles"? I don't think that's the most understandable for anyone.

Vinnl 7y ago

Thanks for cycle.travel :) I probably found out about it in a different comment section as well.

tasuki 7y ago

This is great - bookmarked! I see that while it does try to avoid busy roads, it often takes the road that's right next to the motorway (even when not strictly necessary - probably because it's shorter and has little traffic). It'd be better to prefer roads that are further from busy roads. I understand that's very hand-wavey and probably super tricky to implement.

Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
It would! As you say, roads (or cycleways) beside motorways are usually short, have little traffic, gentle gradients and often a prized position in a valley rather than lumbering up a hillside. Ideal cycle routes... apart from the motorway a few metres (/feet) away. I've got a page of notes on possible ways of fixing this - it is a hard problem. One possibility I'm toying with is a massive grid of "scenic value" for (say) each 0.01° x 0.01° square, so I could downrate the surroundings of motorways and uprate routes through (say) national parks.
- tasuki 7y ago
  Calculating "scenic value" sounds like a very good idea indeed! Plus points for points of interest and greenery, minus points for busy roads. Again, I understand it's not easy to implement :)