There's been a few comments about mapping websites like Bikely etc... so I was thinking it would make a good topic for a review but one which requires more input than just one person, hence this thread. So I would like to invite peoples comments and reviews here which we could then distil into one single review, covering all the main websites.
My suggesion as to what you should cover inlcudes:
- features & functionality
- ease of use
- import/export facilities & printouts
- Suitability
- Extra functionality
I'll kick things off with my views on mapmyride:
__________________
I currently use Mapmyride. I chose it after comparing three sites with the same route. They were Mapmyride, Biketoaster and Bikely.
The first thing that struck me were the differences in ascent data. For my route Biketoaster and Bikely gave the ascent as around 800m and Mapmyride as 375m. Careful checking of the route on an OS revealed that Mapmyride seemed closer. Mapmyride does say that there Algorythm for checking ascent data has been tuned to be more accurate and to prove this you can download the ascent data into Excel. I did this and whilst not totally accurate, it's quite close. On longer climbs it seems to be quite accurate but if you ride rollercoaster single track roads like me, Mapmyride has a habit of not counting the shorter climbs in it's calculations, so it may well underestimate the ascent in those situations. However that's better than Bikely, which told me that I had done 260m of climbing along what is essentially a flat road!
So having chosen Mapmyride, how well does it work? Finding a location is quite easy and one of the features that appealed to me is the ability to tell it that this is a 'there and back ride'. As a lot of mine are, that's just perfect. Adding points is easy, as is editing them and putting in information for stops etc.. The ability to tell it to follow the road means you don't have to plot as many points and so far I have not come across a limit. The only caveat to this is that the Mapmyride website can get painfully slow on longer routes if you zoom in to much.
Mapmyride certainly seems to be packed with features, many of which I've not used yet but amongst these are the ability to make your route private or public, embed your route in your website, save it as a GPX or Garmin file and print it out. The print out is clear but simplified, includes a scale and you get some options, one of which is to include elevation data and route directions and notes. Of the routes I've checked, Mapmyride does seem limited to roads, there is no off road plotting feature and I've not tried to make it go off-road.
So far I've not come across a better site than Mapmyride, though I do wish it they could fix the habit it sometimes has of being grindingly slow.
My suggesion as to what you should cover inlcudes:
- features & functionality
- ease of use
- import/export facilities & printouts
- Suitability
- Extra functionality
I'll kick things off with my views on mapmyride:
__________________
I currently use Mapmyride. I chose it after comparing three sites with the same route. They were Mapmyride, Biketoaster and Bikely.
The first thing that struck me were the differences in ascent data. For my route Biketoaster and Bikely gave the ascent as around 800m and Mapmyride as 375m. Careful checking of the route on an OS revealed that Mapmyride seemed closer. Mapmyride does say that there Algorythm for checking ascent data has been tuned to be more accurate and to prove this you can download the ascent data into Excel. I did this and whilst not totally accurate, it's quite close. On longer climbs it seems to be quite accurate but if you ride rollercoaster single track roads like me, Mapmyride has a habit of not counting the shorter climbs in it's calculations, so it may well underestimate the ascent in those situations. However that's better than Bikely, which told me that I had done 260m of climbing along what is essentially a flat road!
So having chosen Mapmyride, how well does it work? Finding a location is quite easy and one of the features that appealed to me is the ability to tell it that this is a 'there and back ride'. As a lot of mine are, that's just perfect. Adding points is easy, as is editing them and putting in information for stops etc.. The ability to tell it to follow the road means you don't have to plot as many points and so far I have not come across a limit. The only caveat to this is that the Mapmyride website can get painfully slow on longer routes if you zoom in to much.
Mapmyride certainly seems to be packed with features, many of which I've not used yet but amongst these are the ability to make your route private or public, embed your route in your website, save it as a GPX or Garmin file and print it out. The print out is clear but simplified, includes a scale and you get some options, one of which is to include elevation data and route directions and notes. Of the routes I've checked, Mapmyride does seem limited to roads, there is no off road plotting feature and I've not tried to make it go off-road.
So far I've not come across a better site than Mapmyride, though I do wish it they could fix the habit it sometimes has of being grindingly slow.
Wow! I'm not sure if that's any clearer then. What puzzles me is that if you just do a rough count of major ascents on your route using the profile data on MMR, I count (very, very roughly) at least 300m of climbing. If you take in all the little undulations, that's probably another 100m so I reckon 400m of climbing which looking at what isn't added up on the CSV file, seems reasonable. So I could believe the 683m from Sports Track, Bikely's stretching it a bit at 800m but 1500m seems way too high: That's very confusing 
Blimey! I just tried a little bit of that and my eyes kept crossing. 
That's probably why I'm not rich and i drive a crap car. 
