Is "cycle.travel" broken?

[Sweep]

Fair view/point MJR.

To make it clear, I'm not really advocating big re-engineering of cycle.travel.

I think it's great.

In London I tend to use cyclestreets and my own knowledge.

And of course my riding is very different in London. Only carrying a ton of stuff and chilling on my way out and return from tours.

I tend to favour big roads in London if they are the most direct and I am an experienced cyclist.

[Richard Fairhurst]

Ok, I've added a folder option:

• Go to your journey list ('my bike' => 'journeys')
• Click 'Add' on the right to add a folder
• Use the folder icon by each journey to move it into that folder

and then you can just open a folder by clicking its name, either there or on the map page. You can also choose what folder to put a route in when saving. Hope it's useful!

On the issue of route choice, I guess all route-planners struggle to some extent over short routes where there aren't many alternatives, like the A264 example MikeF cited. It's a trunk route with a high traffic count, so cycle.travel avoids it. Over a longer route this gets evened out - try dragging the start back to East Grinstead, for example, and you get a sensible route along NCN 21 then the lanes. But on a short route there's no opportunity to do that - it's either "indirect route" or "heavy traffic", and cycle.travel's bias is to the former. To be really honest it's not really something I think needs fixing - it's pretty obvious from the map that the direct route is an A-road; if you're happy with that then ride it, if not then you'll need to go round the houses. Anyone who needs a computer to work out a four-mile route in the countryside should probably learn to read a map.

The footpath route is a good spot (http://cycle.travel/map/journey/41945) - thanks! In theory a little bit of pushing to avoid a two-mile detour isn't necessarily a bad thing. But in practice this one is impassable because there's a stile. I'll add stiles to the "you shall not pass" list.

In London, cycle.travel does already give a slight upward weighting to roads with bus lanes, but the challenge is to make sense of really contradictory data. For example: the Strand is a non-primary A road with a bus lane, but is essentially uncyclable (IMO) due to the sheer weight of near-stationary traffic. Clapham Road (the A3) is a primary A road with heavy traffic, has a bus lane, forms part of (unsegregated) Cycle Superhighway 7, and people keep asking me to make cycle.travel route along it. But then Bow Road is also a primary A road with heavy traffic, a bus lane and a Cycle Superhighway - and (pre-improvements) people kept getting killed on it, and I really don't want the site to suggest a road like that. How to make sense of all of that is something I haven't yet figured! I don't even know if there is an answer short of editorialising it - i.e. someone sitting down and manually classifying good routes.

But it's all good fun and thanks as ever for all the comments and support - I do enjoy working on this.

(Sweep - I think the London URL you pasted was actually one of MikeF's - could you try again?)

[mjr]

In London, cycle.travel does already give a slight upward weighting to roads with bus lanes, but the challenge is to make sense of really contradictory data. For example: the Strand is a non-primary A road with a bus lane, but is essentially uncyclable (IMO) due to the sheer weight of near-stationary traffic. Clapham Road (the A3) is a primary A road with heavy traffic, has a bus lane, forms part of (unsegregated) Cycle Superhighway 7, and people keep asking me to make cycle.travel route along it. But then Bow Road is also a primary A road with heavy traffic, a bus lane and a Cycle Superhighway - and (pre-improvements) people kept getting killed on it, and I really don't want the site to suggest a road like that. How to make sense of all of that is something I haven't yet figured! I don't even know if there is an answer short of editorialising it - i.e. someone sitting down and manually classifying good routes.

Since some change in the last year or so, cycle.travel now seems to stick to LCN 3 as its CS7 replacement, which is only about 10% slower and probably a reasonable compromise for the reduced pollution. I think I complained about its CS7 avoidance when it used to zig-zag around backstreets much more.

[BeardyWeirdy]

Hi Richard

Thanks for the folder option, it will be very handy for tours etc. Is it possible to edit and/or delete the folders names?

I used the site for planning this years tour around the Baltic coast of Germany and Denmark - it worked well in general. A couple of requests, if you don't mind. None of these are intended as criticisms, just some ideas that would help me!

First, would it be possible to get some form of scale or standard grid on the pdf maps. I was swapping between downloaded touring and local scale pdf on my phone and judging the distances was tricky. I tend to make a single pdf with touring scale maps in general with local area scale bit for tricky bits, and finding our destination etc,

Second, would it be possible to make it easier to follow organised cycle routes, for example I was following the Baltic cycle route, and the ended up with a lot of waypoints to keep the route to follow the path. when abroad I fine it easier to follow the routes as it saves a lot of stopping and map reading.

Third - is there any way of increasing the visibility of the route on the pdfs, when I print out a hard copy the pale blue is very difficult to see - I end up using a highlighter to mark the route.

Thanks for all your efforts

[Bmblbzzz]

Stiles: a while ago my dad got from somewhere or other a pile of 1930s cycling magazines and in one of them was an article about the joys of footpath riding in the country. It mentioned stiles and how a lightweight machine could easily be lifted over them. I think that's fair enough (ignoring the legal situation) for a rider with average upper body strength and a lightweight machine but clearly not for everyone and probably not for anyone with a touring load.

[Richard Fairhurst]

Third - is there any way of increasing the visibility of the route on the pdfs, when I print out a hard copy the pale blue is very difficult to see - I end up using a highlighter to mark the route.

Done! That's been bothering me for a while too.

I've also tweaked the server such that the PDF file size will be much smaller (sometimes half what it was before).

Will add an option to edit/delete folder names when I get a spare minute, and a scale too. An option to follow signposted routes directly isn't really possible with the way the route-planner works, I'm afraid - but in due course I'd like to have more route guides on the site (like the UK ones at the moment) which each come with a pre-planned route, so you could just go to the pages for the Baltic route and get a ready-plotted route from there.

[BeardyWeirdy]

that's much better - thanks

[anniesboy]

I am not able to see any maps.hence route planning is not possible.

I have posted on Cycle Travel forum,it was OK yesterday

[Richard Fairhurst]

Yep, something skewy with the server. Not sure what yet, am looking into it.

[Richard Fairhurst]

And it's back. According to the hosts, hetzner.de, "unfortunately a neighbor servers of yours activated the electrical fuse for this part of the rack, after we've solved this your server is reachable again". Impressed with their quick response (especially considering that they're astonishingly good value).

[anniesboy]

Many thanks for the quick resolution of the issue