Cycling UK Forum

Well spotted! Now live.

gbnz wrote: ↑6 Mar 2024, 3:58pm

Vorpal wrote: ↑6 Mar 2024, 10:41am
Romans & Victorians immediately recognised the contours of the local landscape and were able to engineer an appropriate route.

Oh I recognise that the Romans & Victorians were able to recognise the contours of the local landscape, as I had even as a 13yr old. Was merely bemused that the modern day "cycle route" planner, didn't appear to have the ability to follow an obvious route

Little or no engineering of any era on the routes & wasn't even as if the restrictions on modern day paths, tracks or roads being constructed, would have been a restraining factor. All the roads required for an obvious route existed, even the Roman road now being tarmac

It would help if you actually said where you were talking about!

Yes, I think most routers apply a small time penalty for traffic lights.

People have different tastes. Some will happily trade more motor traffic for less climbing. Others (including me) would prefer a bit of climbing if it means fewer cars.

Generally, signposted routes will lean towards the "fewer cars" end of the spectrum, and the valley roads have more cars. But if you don't like them you don't have to follow them.

I really like the ride between Kings Cross and Paddington - if you follow the official cycle route (used to be London Cycle Network 0, now C27 apparently) it's both safe and interesting. That's the way cycle.travel will send you by default. Don't, whatever you do, ride the Euston Road!

mjr wrote: ↑23 Feb 2024, 3:54pmMaybe I forget some?

This isn't a "forget" because it's not open yet, but there's a new cycleway - the Misbourne Greenway - being constructed beside the Chiltern line between Wendover and Great Missenden. Not long (four miles?) but it will cut out a nasty bit of A road. It's partly funded by HS2, too.

I think LNER also removed some of the carriage-end windowless seats (which unsurprisingly aren’t very popular) to provide space for suitcases.

Yep, routing and place search is all done on a server rather then on your phone. That means it can be (in theory!) faster and smarter but does mean you need an internet connection I’m afraid.

It can - they appear on the map, and it tells you about them in the turn-by-turn directions if you're using the app.

Yep. c.t has four options (in the UK at least): standard, paved only, gravel, and night-time. That means having four routing graphs in memory. Each graph is many many gigabytes in size and obviously that ratchets up the server costs!

richardfm wrote: ↑8 Feb 2024, 6:06pm I thought the OPs complaint was that Cycle.Travel alters a route that he has uploaded from a GPX file, not one that it has worked out for him after he has given start and end points.

It sounds reasonable to me not to expect Cycle.Travel to alter an uploaded routes. Maybe the secret is to add plenty of waypoints before uploading.

cycle.travel doesn't have any sense of a GPX route per se. It only does one thing - planned routes with via points. Between each pair of via points, it will choose the route it thinks is best.

So if you import a GPX track, it has to work out where the via points need to be in order to follow the route represented by the GPX track. This is a Hard Problem and it doesn't always get it spot on, especially if the GPX is along the sort of routes c.t wouldn't usually choose - i.e. busy roads or rough tracks. (This is all explained on the upload page.)

If what you want to do is manage/play with other people's GPXs then c.t is absolutely the wrong site for that - I'd always suggest RideWithGPS for that sort of purpose.

roubaixtuesday wrote: ↑8 Feb 2024, 5:55pmPresumably these apps have criteria to apply (distance, road type, ascent etc) when optimising a route.

Often they do daft things like repeatedly diverting off a main road, or putting in a huge climb to avoid a short section.

It would be great if you could vary the weighting eg choose to downweight how important road type was to avoid that sort of nonsense.

You can do that with Brouter, which is pretty much infinitely customisable.

Route-planners can either be fast or customisable. The fast algorithms aren't customisable and the customisable algorithms aren't fast.* Brouter chooses to be customisable, which offers more flexibility but means it takes 15 seconds to work out a route for Land's End to John O'Groats. cycle.travel chooses to be fast, so it finds LE-JOG in less than a second, but conversely it bakes in its idea of a good route (= low traffic and scenic).

This is the good thing about there being so many sites/apps - you can choose the one that suits you.

* For those interested in the algorithm side of things, this is because the fast algorithms essentially pre-calculate routes between thousands of points, so route-planning just needs to retrieve the pre-calculated route rather than working out afresh each time. That breaks down if you offer customisation, because it's impossible to pre-calculate and store the best routes for every conceivable set of routing preferences the user might set.

It looks like this is the brainchild of the Yorkshire Coast Business Improvement District (a sort of Chamber of Commerce on steroids, funded by a surcharge on business rates), and it's yet another attempt to do a North Coast 500-type product with diminishing returns. I'd be very surprised if there are signs for these circular routes.

I suspect it will sink without trace, but who knows.

Ah, it was getting thrown by the annual vs monthly payment thing (I've only recently switched that on!). Fixed, thank you.

Ok - something has fouled up on your computer/network provider! If you can't see the map there then your computer is refusing to load images from cycle.travel's mapping server. It might be a bug somewhere in your system or it might be a misclick, but I don't think it's anything that cycle.travel can control, I'm afraid.

I'd suggest disabling any extensions that you might have installed (e.g. ad-blocker) and resetting your browser in any way you can. It might be worth trying another browser (e.g. Firefox if you usually use Chrome).

That's odd - nothing has changed on the site that should cause that to happen. Do you see a small square map in this post here?