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Route-planning site cycle.travel rolls out "Street View for bikes"

Can I ride my road bike down that track? Find out with ingenious image mash-up

Route planning site cycle.travel has introduced a new feature: photographs of bike paths and trails that allow you to find out what the surface of a track is like before you set out. In short, they say, it's Street View for cyclists.

The surfaces of cycle tracks vary wildly, from well-kept tarmac and concrete to muddy singletrack. That makes planning a route that avoids roads as much as possible a bit of a lottery. This writer found himself on a rubble-surfaced Roman road recently after following a route south of Cambridge generated by CycleStreets.

If I’d used cycle.travel I’d have known that what looked like a road on the map actually looked like this on the ground:

To be fair to the enormously useful CycleStreets, it actually turned a road bike ride into a bit of an adventure and if I’d bothered to scroll down the route plan I’d have found CycleStreets’ photos too.

But cycle.travel has done a really good job of implementing the photos feature. Click on a section of the route on the map and you’re offered a ‘Find photos’ option. You can therefore immediately see which sections are not on proper roads and check them out.

I’ve not explored cycle.travel in much depth, but one feature that’s immediately appealing and I’ve not seen elsewhere is the ability to automatically create a circular route that takes in a point. If you want to visit a particular cafe, say, but want to come back by an different route, that’s really handy.

The cycle.travel folks say they were inspired by a perennial question on bike forums: “can I ride along that track on my bike?”.

To answer it, they’ve tapped into community photo project Geograph, which collects photos of every corner of the British Isles.

Cycle.travel’s editor Richard Fairhurst said: “The idea for this came from seeing ‘Can I cycle the C2C on a road bike?’ on a cycling forum for about the tenth time.

“If it was on-road, you could check it out on Google Street View. But that doesn’t cover cycle paths or bridleways. These photos do – and make it really easy to research quiet bike routes away from busy roads.”

Cycle.travel uses OpenStreetMap data, and takes surface type, hills, and National Cycle Network routes into account when planning a route. Other features include:

  • ‘Draggable’ routes and via points
  • Save routes and share with others
  • Print a PDF map at one of three scales (city, local or touring)
  • Elevation profile

The site’s cartography also shows cycle path surfaces in three clear styles (tarmac, firm, or muddy), so you know whether you can ride a trail on skinny tyres or whether you need to get out your mountain bike.

Check it out at cycle.travel.

John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.

He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.

Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.

John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.

He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.

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10 comments

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notfastenough | 9 years ago
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Aha! I've changed jobs, and there appears to be an off-road route to get most of the way here. I've been wondering whether a section of the towpath is rideable on a roadbike. I shall take a look.

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jennacatlin | 9 years ago
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These photos really are quite helpful. It always better to know your way before you ride. MobitAirportparking.co.uk is offering safe parking amenities for you to.

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kie7077 | 10 years ago
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+1

Now all I need is some way to easily turn planned routes into something that I can easily load on to a android phone sat nav type thing. That way I can use my spare old android phone which is waterproof and would be ideal for the job.

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Doctor Fegg | 10 years ago
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The maps are based on OpenStreetMap, too, not Google... but they do look a bit different to the usual OSM maps!

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workhard | 10 years ago
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very handy for checking out NCN paths.

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Ghostie | 10 years ago
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Useful site - just discovered on there a further trail that I didn't know existed close to where I usually already cycle that will add a little more to my off-road route.

Problem with off-road that I'm finding, I have had to dig around to find out which bridleways can be ridden on as there are occasionally restrictions attached banning cycling from some parts sometimes due to the archaeological significance of the route - parts of that old Roman Rd that the author of this article ended up on included, which I know of.

Also, a problem with that site - isn't their fault - as it uses google street maps and sometimes not so recent photos, you'll never know the surface you are riding on until you actually ride on it. The heavy rain of the winter has particularly made some bridleway/trail surface's pretty unrideable, apart from on a mountain bike, where the ground was churned up and has since dried out, so the pictures are not as useful now except to do preliminary route planning. I came off my bike last week riding on one. Probably will be years before they are back to a better condition.

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dodgy replied to Ghostie | 10 years ago
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Ghostie wrote:

Also, a problem with that site - isn't their fault - as it uses google street maps and sometimes not so recent photos, you'll never know the surface you are riding on until you actually ride on it.

I believe it uses photos from http://geograph.org.uk not Google?

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Ghostie replied to dodgy | 10 years ago
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dodgy wrote:
Ghostie wrote:

Also, a problem with that site - isn't their fault - as it uses google street maps and sometimes not so recent photos, you'll never know the surface you are riding on until you actually ride on it.

I believe it uses photos from http://geograph.org.uk not Google?

Yes, as it says above in the article. Useful having those.

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Initialised | 10 years ago
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Where do I apply to do this for all my local trails?

http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/street-view-we-can-trike-wherev...

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dodgy | 10 years ago
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This is excellent, used the site before but with the photos it's brilliant!

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