Route planning

nigsbrown wrote:Worked out

nigsbrown wrote:

Worked out how to get the make a route to function near me. I had to set a via point and then it worked. Shame there isn’t an avoid major roads feature, as alot of the routes that it cam up with had turns across traffic on dual carriageways. :S

That’s odd, as there used to be, although it was still a little hit and miss. I see now that they’ve replaced it with a facility to avoid certain roads by selecting them on the map.

Seems to be a backward step to me, if you’re plotting routes which may take you through unfamiliar areas, how would you know in advance that the roads wouldn’t be suitable, unless you “ride” the entire route in Streetview first?!

+1 for RideWithGPS, not only
+1 for RideWithGPS, not only can you make your own routes up, but you can search for routes that others have shared and take your pick (you can filter by location and length as well).

Alternatively the Garmin Edge Touring apparently has a feature where you tell it how far you want to go and it will make up several routes for you on the spot. Don’t own one so can’t comment on how good it is, but would love an app/website that could do this for you and then give you a gpx file to download.

Alternatively you could throw your money at a few sportives or Audax’s (thus paying someone to do all the hard work for you).

I hadn’t seen plotaroute.com
I hadn’t seen plotaroute.com before, but it looks really good. I might try routes from that ‘make me a route’ function between home and work.

http://www.plotaroute.com is worth a
http://www.plotaroute.com is worth a look.

On first glance it appears a normal mapping facility, but if you use the “make me a route” function then it’ll create 10 random routes for you based on a given start/finish point and how far you want to ride.

You might want to use the in-built Streetview functionality just to double-check whether some of the roads are suitable, but it’s a good start and it’s easy to modify the route if you need to.

Routes can then be exported in various formats to use on whatever device you’ve got strapped to the bars.

Bike Hike.
Bike Hike.

I use strava search to find
I use strava search to find local routes other people have done that I haven’t done before I then download them and us gpsies.com to draw over them with any mods I want to make. Gpsies will also add route guidance but not as good as ridewithgps. If ridewithgps would add turn-by-turn to imported routes that would be killer. I then load the routes on my garmin.

When planning routes on
When planning routes on unfamiliar roads, I use Google StreetView in conjunction with MapMyRide (which used to have the absolute best route mapper — since copied or licensed by others). StreetView gives you a good idea as to the road surface (I ride lots of gravel/dirt roads), lets you see if there are paved shoulders or bike lanes, and even how busy the road is (judged by how many cars are in the images).

If I am looking to find/add the best climbs I use Strava’s search by categorized climb feature. Note: Strava’s beta version route mapper looks pretty good so I might drop MMR for it.

I’ve also been experimenting with Strava’s Heat Map to identify the popular road sections — I am not sure if it indicates quality over quantity yet.

I would love to see these combined in to a single tool (hint)