Route Planning Open Discussion

[Heltor Chasca]

Cycle.Travel: is my out and out winner. I have rarely experienced any issues and if I was forced into saying if there was anything I didn’t like, it would be the fact it is best used on a Mac or Desktop. iPad or iPhone isn’t there yet. Maybe at a push, I would admit that I try and get it to route away from the vagaries of Sustrans routes. It is free.

Komoot: OK for route planning on tour or for simple point to point stuff. However it is dreadful for uploading set routes as it manipulates the route as it ‘thinks it knows better’. This has happened on two DIY 200 Audax events and two very long rides were corrupted to the point of stupidity. One sending me off on a very lumpy gravel track with unnecessary elevation. As I was on a road bike I had to walk. I was lucky not to get a DNF on the event I was on. Touring in remote regions with this level of unreliability could have disastrous consequences. If it wasn’t for a handy campsite option, I would have completely dumped Komoot. £20 for global maps.

Ride With GPS. I use this for uploading organiser supplied routes and for sending completed rides off to others in GPX or TPX format. Utterly reliable and never manipulates routes. I haven’t used it yet for route planning. Very expensive subscription costs. (IMO)

Strava Route Builder: I have only just started playing about with this as I am a fully paid up Strava customer. I really like the fact you can get it to choose popular routes other riders use and you can opt to route along less lumpy journeys.

I would be interested on your thoughts, particularly anyone who regularly uses the Strava Builder.

 

[Drago]

I'm a bit(!) old fashioned. I've gone through the British Army Navigation Course, so got shouted at and occasionally slapped for 4 weeks until I could read a map and navigate properly. The upside is that 3 decades on I can glance at a map in the morning and won't need to refer to it again until lunchtime. Although I'm forced to use the for SAR planning (I actually cheat and use MapYX for that) I can use paper paper more effectively than any electronic aid.

So there's my handy tip - join the infantry at 18 if you want to be an ace navigator.

 

[steveindenmark]

I was an army map reading instructor. Compared to modern day methods its draconian.

RWGPS is my main planning app. Its easy to use and customisecand it has Street View. It is easy to send over to my Wahoo. Its the tool I use to send me on the roads I want to travel.

Strava heatmap. I use this to cross reference the RWGPS route.

Komoot. Another cross reference tool. It also transfers to my Wahoo.


Strava Router. Just started using it. Transfers to Wahoo.

 

[Drago]

It was probably you that ran my LandNav course in Brecon, and who used to call me a lanky t**t and slap me round the head 3 or 4 times a day. I'm lucky you didn't give me brain damage!

 

[PapaZita]

I use the Strava route builder, mostly because of its integration with both Wahoo and Veloviewer. It’s OK. I’d like more detail on the maps, but the heatmap is useful. It’s possible to use it on a tablet, but I prefer a desktop as I haven’t worked out how to insert a point (hover and drag) with a touchscreen. Popularity and min elevation options are handy but be aware that they affect routing between points already placed, and not just for new points. That has caught me out before. Little detailed edits can be awkward, particularly, I’ve found, trying to get it to use cycle paths rather than adjacent roads. That can involve the placement of many more points than ought to be necessary, and sometimes confused and crashy behaviour from the tool, so save often. The only method I’ve found for importing a route into Strava, e.g. from cycle.travel, is a Strava Labs tool that sometimes works, and when it does still has a tendency to change details.

Cycle.travel is great. I wish it had more options for telling it which types of surface I want to use. Given this, and the difficulties of importing routes into Strava, I usually use it more for inspiration rather than for precise route planning.

I do like a good OS map. I understand what I’m looking at and can usually see the route I want to take. I’m not aware of a tool that will let me plan my route on an OS map, but Veloviewer will show a route that I’ve planned in Strava as a line overlaid on OS Landranger, Open Cycle Map, and various other maps. I use that quite a lot, and particularly the ability to flip between the different map types. OS for countryside, OCM for towns, satellite view for hints about track quality, etc.

All these tools seem easier on a desktop computer with a mouse. I like to use my office computer with two monitors. Typically, the Strava route builder on one screen and Veloviewer’s OS map on the other. I might start with cycle.travel, and transfer that route, sometimes automatically but often just manually into Strava, then review on Veloviewer, refine on Strava, and repeat until I’m happy.

 

[Heltor Chasca]

I use the Strava route builder, mostly because of its integration with both Wahoo and Veloviewer. It’s OK. I’d like more detail on the maps, but the heatmap is useful. It’s possible to use it on a tablet, but I prefer a desktop as I haven’t worked out how to insert a point (hover and drag) with a touchscreen. Popularity and min elevation options are handy but be aware that they affect routing between points already placed, and not just for new points. That has caught me out before. Little detailed edits can be awkward, particularly, I’ve found, trying to get it to use cycle paths rather than adjacent roads. That can involve the placement of many more points than ought to be necessary, and sometimes confused and crashy behaviour from the tool, so save often. The only method I’ve found for importing a route into Strava, e.g. from cycle.travel, is a Strava Labs tool that sometimes works, and when it does still has a tendency to change details.

Cycle.travel is great. I wish it had more options for telling it which types of surface I want to use. Given this, and the difficulties of importing routes into Strava, I usually use it more for inspiration rather than for precise route planning.

I do like a good OS map. I understand what I’m looking at and can usually see the route I want to take. I’m not aware of a tool that will let me plot my route on an OS map, but Veloviewer will show a route that I’ve planned in Strava as a line overlaid on OS Landranger, Open Cycle Map, and various other maps. I use that quite a lot, and particularly the ability to flip between the different map types. OS for countryside, OCM for towns, satellite view for hints about track quality, etc.

All these tools seem easier on a desktop computer with a mouse. I like to use my office computer with two monitors. Typically, the Strava route builder on one screen and Veloviewer’s OS map on the other. I might start with cycle.travel, and transfer that route, sometimes automatically but often just manually into Strava, then review on Veloviewer, refine on Strava, and repeat until I’m happy.

Thanks for the thoughts in Strava. I have built a draft 300 which didn’t take long at all. I agree that more detail would be handy. Pubs, cafés, shops, campsites etc would be useful. But I like how there is no messing about with details going through towns and cities. It just chooses a straightforward route that is popular, although I get the point upthread that you need to check you aren’t being harangued into following commuter routes. When trying to plot flatter routes in the South West, I get steam coming out of the Strava server! There are no flat routes round these parts.

 

[Poacher]

It was probably you that ran my LandNav course in Brecon, and who used to call me a lanky t**t and slap me round the head 3 or 4 times a day. I'm lucky you didn't give me brain damage!

Must not take the bait.
Must not bite.
Must exercise self-control.......

 

[lane]

I use the Strava route builder, mostly because of its integration with both Wahoo and Veloviewer. It’s OK. I’d like more detail on the maps, but the heatmap is useful. It’s possible to use it on a tablet, but I prefer a desktop as I haven’t worked out how to insert a point (hover and drag) with a touchscreen. Popularity and min elevation options are handy but be aware that they affect routing between points already placed, and not just for new points. That has caught me out before. Little detailed edits can be awkward, particularly, I’ve found, trying to get it to use cycle paths rather than adjacent roads. That can involve the placement of many more points than ought to be necessary, and sometimes confused and crashy behaviour from the tool, so save often. The only method I’ve found for importing a route into Strava, e.g. from cycle.travel, is a Strava Labs tool that sometimes works, and when it does still has a tendency to change details.

Cycle.travel is great. I wish it had more options for telling it which types of surface I want to use. Given this, and the difficulties of importing routes into Strava, I usually use it more for inspiration rather than for precise route planning.

I do like a good OS map. I understand what I’m looking at and can usually see the route I want to take. I’m not aware of a tool that will let me plan my route on an OS map, but Veloviewer will show a route that I’ve planned in Strava as a line overlaid on OS Landranger, Open Cycle Map, and various other maps. I use that quite a lot, and particularly the ability to flip between the different map types. OS for countryside, OCM for towns, satellite view for hints about track quality, etc.

All these tools seem easier on a desktop computer with a mouse. I like to use my office computer with two monitors. Typically, the Strava route builder on one screen and Veloviewer’s OS map on the other. I might start with cycle.travel, and transfer that route, sometimes automatically but often just manually into Strava, then review on Veloviewer, refine on Strava, and repeat until I’m happy.

You can plan a route on Outdoors Great Britain app on a tablet using OS maps. There is a cost to the maps and you have to plan the route entirely yourself but can be good in some circumstances.

 

[Ming the Merciless]

Yes I like cycle.travel. It can create overly long routes so I usually drag the bits
I want to change before exporting. It found a great green corridor through a large town today. You would hardly know the town is there.

Once I have exported the track I tend to load into my desktop based mapping and make any final tweaks, add waypoints before sending to GPS.

Touring I tend to carry a 1:100,000 map which I find a good scale for planning day to day. Then just make a note of villages and clip to handlebars for that day's itinerary.

 

[Ming the Merciless]

A6 ring notepad for that last bit.

 

[cosmicbike]

Always been a RidewithGPS user for route planning, but more recently started using Strava in Chrome with the Veloviewer add on, allows me to plan around Explorer squares. It's not as accurate on elevation, Fridays 100 miler was 1000ft out!

 

[Aravis]

To understand the landscape and how the road network fits together I use traditional maps, usually Ordnance Survey. Paper if looking at a wide area or Bing Maps if I need to look at things in detail (or if I don't have the paper). I use RideWithGPS more as a documentation tool than a planning tool. If, when using it I find it's connected two points with what looks like a useful route, that's a bonus, but generally that's not what I'm requiring it to do.

By comparison with anything else I've seen, when entering and amending data I can be extremely confident it's done exactly what I want. The display is crystal clear. I still make mistakes. Last Autumn I found I'd routed myself along a farm track that required me to ride through a barn. Fortunately there was no-one around to complain.

Until recently I've been perfectly content with the free version. A feature I'd always been prepared to overlook is that the length of a planned route is always about 4 tenths of a mile in every 100 longer than the track I later record on Garmin. Having started this year to submit mandatory DiY by GPS Audaxes, this has become undesirable. Reducing the number of trackpoints is one way of dealing with it, but that seems to be a premium feature in RideWithGPS.

The solution I've used is to export a GPX file, import it into BikeHike, and reduce the number of trackpoints put there by RideWithGPS by about two thirds (4000 down to about 1400, for example). The file I then export from BikeHike is the one I use on the ride and send to AUK. As well as greatly reducing the size of the file (making it much quicker to load on my Garmin) it also removes the annoying virtual partner that RideWithGPS embeds in the file. There may be easier ways of achieving this, but it's still all free and for the moment it's become my standard method.

But, concurring 100% with @Dogtrousers, nothing is ridden that hasn't been evaluated using Ordnance Survey.

 

[Ian H]

Gpx Editor is my favourite, both for planning routes and checking AUK events before publication. It offers 'shortest' and 'optimal' amongst other things. It only does 1:50k in OS (but also Google Maps, OSM, & subscribers get OCM), so I might look at Bing maps (OS 1:25k) for more detail, and Streetview if required. For France, the IGN portal is not too bad.

 

[Deleted member 26715]

I don't think there are any very good ones out there, most of my stuff is off-road, but I've yet to find one that is a comprehensive & upto date, most are missing huge numbers to bridleways, cycleways etc. I know from my house to a main road 4 miles away there are several routes, yet none of them are available on any mapping software I've seen.

 

[Richard Fairhurst]

I don't think there are any very good ones out there, most of my stuff is off-road, but I've yet to find one that is a comprehensive & upto date, most are missing huge numbers to bridleways, cycleways etc. I know from my house to a main road 4 miles away there are several routes, yet none of them are available on any mapping software I've seen.

Most cycle mapping sites/apps use OpenStreetMap which is user-editable, so sign up for OSM and add them!