Route Planning with GPS / OSM for Riding and Touring

Spanks

This is great @platypus - Brouter especially. Thanks

Haven't had much of a play with it but the isochrones setting on openrouteservice looks fun to play with - and good for house hunting.

glad to help you out! have fun with the isochrones

Throwing this out there since it's reached an effort plateau for now: https://routecheck.cc/

• Strava heatmap layer
  
• Click anywhere for a quick streetview preview
  
• Load a saved route from RideWithGPS or GPX upload or
  OpenRouteService routing. Toggle with g key.
  
  

Mainly useful (to me anyway) for comparing a rwgps route with the heatmap and spot checking streetview.

you developed this? awesome!!!

It's really good @Yemble. Just wondering how much you know about the heatmap parameters? What makes a road red etc? I presume it is in comparison to other local volume as opposed to total volume?

Yep, started in response to a suggestion on twitter. I'm not intending to make it a super routing tool - that's covered by these other amazing websites - but let me know if some tweak would make it more useful or if it has bugs.

@boomboom it's just the heatmap tiles from Strava, I'm not sure what their criteria are ie when the color step-changes. Maybe 50% of some arbitrary gradient, but don't know on what regional scale. I find the color1 scheme a bit intense, some of the blues are easier to work with. Most of the settings are sticky so you don't have to change them every time.

Edit: found this blog post that explains the methodology; sounds like it's counting gpx points and using neighbouring tiles for scale.

Interesting thanks.

One thing would be cool would be able to map OSM POIs onto it (something like this ) and have the ability to select the POIs & download them.

(probably doesn't count as a 'tweak')

Hmm, could be done. Show useful (bars, cafes, gas stations, etc) POIs and add the ones inside the route bounding box to the "Export GPX" data? I think there's an optional extension to the GPX format for POIs.

Cool.

What do you mean by the route bounding box? Is that what the browser displays?

A rectangle around whatever route (rwgps/gpx/ors) is currently shown. Could default to use the browser window if no route, but then you'd just get a gpx file with no route, just points of interest - is that useful?

(I have an ancient Garmin 705 and free rwgps account so I don't use POIs on device, I don't know what's useful here)

I'm a big fan of Cycle.Travel (http://cycle.travel/)
It generates routes which are optimised for bikes. It can be a bitr shy of busy roads, but I have found it to be really reliable for routing in areas in the UK that I am not familiar with. In every route I've planned it has generated a route that has been pretty good on the ground.
You can click on an area in the route and it will find any google image form that location, so you can see if the route is a busy A road, or a farm track.
Lots of export options and the street by street turn by turn guide is useful, but unfortunately can't be exported.

@yemble Re: downloading all POIs in a browser window, that could be useful for general cycle touring e.g. if you were staying somewhere for a couple of nights, but not immediately useful.

What would be cool with the GPX route is to have a rectangle (of size that you specify) e.g. 50m that follows the route and you are then able to download all of the selected POIs that fall within those boundaries.

I think being able to download the POIs separately from the GPX would be better than having them integrated into the GPX file.

What i find difficult to manage is having all of the POIs on my Etrex which are loaded up from the OSM basemap. I want to have only the POIs that I know will be on my route and in categories that I would find useful.

Hope that makes sense?

Got it. I'll have a look later - no promises :)

Cool - no expectations :-) thanks.

@boomboom take a look now, I've added POIs from OSM with some export options. They're not appearing on my old garmin but then.. I don't know if it even supports them.

UI was getting a bit busy so I gave that a makeover too.

Drop me a PM on here - definitely cluttered up @platypus' fine thread enough already.

Edit: looks like it was caching so if the UI looks broken, force a refresh with Shift-Cmd-R or Shift-Ctrl-F5. Should be fixed after that.

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http://gpxhyperlapse.com is handy for getting the feel of a route too.

Could be more useful with a bit of work. For example, if it took a streetview image shortly after every waypointed junction you could check you haven't routed yourself on any big roads.

Hey, I'm trying to edit down a rather long hiking trail gpx to the bits I need (to work out distance and get rid of superfluous information for when I finally transfer it to my Garmin/phone). I've tried a few different pieces of software to delete points but this is not coming to me intuitively. I've also tried recreating the route using mapmyride, but this particular trail (Rideau Trail in Ontario, Canada) isn't known by Google, so auto routing isn't working. Anyone have something they'd recommend?

This is the train/GPX: http://www.rideautrail.org/discover-the-trail/maps/

We're going to walk about a third of it next month.

That gpx contains 38 separate tracks and 21 other items of information plus 145 waypoints. Deleting points will not really work unless you join the individual tracks first. I would try recreating the route but not too sure I can advise you where.
If you tell me the names of the tracks that you will be walking I shall join them in sequential order.

Thanks for responding! I've just gone and done it old school with paper and pen (before I realized Excel also works). Got a four day route all planned out - exciting!

Looking for advice on a good computer for touring. I need:

–Long battery life, mains rechargable, ideally replacable batteries for when I'm stranded
–Detailed, reliable mapping

The Garmins all seem to have approx 20hr batt life, not great. My phone lasts a week.

I dont need any software that helps me monitor heartrate, calories, share rides with others or upload other peoples rides, turn by turn navigation, or to connect with my phone, just a portable digital map, with a speedometer. My budget is around £250. I have never owned a cycle computer, so not sure where to start.

I had similar requirements and was never impressed with the cost involved in buying a cycle computer.
I've ended up using my phone.
There are lots of map apps and navigation apps that work really well and as you said your phone lasts for days compared. If you don't have an iPhone you can buy spare batteries as well as carrying charger blocks.
You can use offline maps so you don't even need an internet connection. Just the GPS on your phone is required.

If you don't have an iPhone you can buy spare batteries as well as carrying charger blocks.

You have a smart phone with batteries you can replace? Which is it? I have an old style phone with no internet connection, hence the long battery life. It means I can go camping for a week and still stay in contact if needed.

Yes, downloaded offline maps would be ideal. I enjoy the process of navigation / orientation, and find satnav irritating. I think however I'd like to stop carrying paper maps around.

Not sure you're going to find much with gps and a > 20hr battery life. However, the Garmin etrex range use standard AA batteries if that's better for you? https://buy.garmin.com/en-GB/GB/p/156867