Cycle Travel Question

[Woodtourer]

Poland and Baltic Countries.
So good to hear these are soon to be available!!!

[Tenkaykev]

What a great piece of software. I did a trip back in 1989 from the southernmost part of Ireland to the northernmost ( Mizen Head to Malin Head via Cork and Dublin )

I put it in the route planner and used the tool to pull a couple of points across to the places I remember going through and it gave me the route I took. Looking at the names of some of the villages that I travelled through rekindled memories that I thought I'd lost. ( I never used to write things down thinking Oh, I'll always remember this )

I do remember the road from Cork to Dublin being a bit of a nightmare with regard to traffic and lorries doing the run down from Dublin in the mornings and heading back the other way later in the day. Probably a no go nowadays with there being so much more traffic on the road.

Many thanks to Richard for all his work.

[Richard Fairhurst]

A big one today!

cycle.travel's map and route-planner now covers Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. Fifteen new countries: Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, (North) Macedonia, Albania, Greece. So you can ask it for a round-trip from Athens to Trondheim and it'll happily oblige.

All exactly as you'd expect with the same preferences for quiet roads and full mapping of signposted cycle routes. I've been happily enjoying the "virtual tourist" experience planning routes through the Balkans...

There's a handful of routing weight changes, too, which should help it find better routes in cities and be a bit more wary of really steep hills; and the map style has changed to have clearer hillshading.

(For those with an interest in what happens under the hood, I've completely rewritten the elevation code to use a really wondrous bit of new research called ZFP, developed at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This enables storing height data in a fraction of the space it previously required; the upshot is that I can store more countries in the same amount of memory!)

[Woodtourer]

Fantastic!!
Richard all your work is greatly appreciated!!!
Thanks

[gloomyandy]

Hi,
I love cycle.travel and use it pretty much every week to plan my club's "Monday Meander" however even for such a ride the routing around the Queensbury area of W. Yorks is just odd. Take a look at the following route:
https://cycle.travel/map/journey/83697
The two via points are my attempt to make the route follow the main road, but nothing seems to work. There seems to be some sort of disconnect in that bit of road. No idea if this is a cycle.travel problem or the base map sorry. I have noticed a few of these issues recently (much more so than before) so perhaps a recent change has introduced a problem?

Oh and it would be really nice if there was some way to encourage cycle.travel to use a "main" road a bit more. It still seems very determined to take you off down parallel side roads. If you apply multiple via points it still seems to want to use them, even for just a few hundred yards which really makes no sense at all. Take a look at this route:
https://cycle.travel/map/journey/83484
Via points 1, 2, 3, 4 are needed to stop the routing darting onto the side roads, the main road here has a reasonable on road cycle lane for most of it. I understand that quiet roads are preferred but it would be great if it could perhaps take the via point as a bit more of a hint, perhaps if two adjacent ones are on the same main road it could reduce the "attraction" of the side roads?


Anyway please keep up the good work!

[Richard Fairhurst]

That is odd! I'll take a look - thanks for spotting.

[Edit: ok, I think I know why it's doing it; there's a quirk in the elevation data which is making it think there's a mystery steep hill on that road. Haven't 100% figured out how to fix it yet but I have some ideas...]

For the main road one, you might want to look at the "Go direct" option (i.e. put a via point at the start of the main road, another at the end, then click the first one and choose "Go direct to next") - it'll draw a straight line between the two which is sometimes easier than adding more via points. Getting it to avoid detours like this is difficult given the approach that the core routing algorithm takes (Contraction Hierarchies) but it's something that I keep looking into.

[BeardyWeirdy]

Thank you Richard

I was just starting to plan a loop out of Copenhagen through S Sweden - so very handy

Richard

[gloomyandy]

Thanks Richard I wasn't aware of the go direct option! I will certainly take a look at it. Hope you manage to work out what is going on with the other routing problem. Here is the other example I came across:
https://cycle.travel/map/journey/83737
not sure if it is the same issue or not, but nothing I did would make it go via that middle section of main road and as far as I can tell there is no one way system or anything!

Thanks again.

[Angstrom]

Hi Richard.

Thanks for your great tool.

I appreciate your effort to produce the best algorithm for routing away from main roads. It is excellent.

Yet each of us has a personal opinion about how much we're ready to "pay" (in increased effort, distance etc.) for the comfort of riding away from those busy roads. Have you thought of one day offering the possibility to change profiles or even better, let the user create/modify a personal profile for your routing engine?

I have used BRouter before and they open their scripting language for this purpose.

Thanks.

[Richard Fairhurst]

I get asked that one quite a lot and ended up writing a short answer on the FAQ page: https://cycle.travel/about/maps

In brief - route-planning algorithms can either be customisable or fast, but not both! cycle.travel uses a fast one (Contraction Hierarchies) but it means that the weightings are "baked in". That means that cycle.travel will compute a route from, say, Malmo to Madrid in less than a second - the time taken is sending the route across the internet and then displaying it on a browser - whereas brouter takes minutes for the same calculation. It's that fast speed that enables real-time draggable routes. But the corollary is that the weighting isn't customisable.

I do have a long-term ambition to offer a couple of different profiles - say, one for road bikes and one for gravel/bikepacking. But that requires either a new routing algorithm or renting two additional servers, so probably won't be for a couple of years.

[andrew_s]

It looks to me like both these are route disconnects, where two sections of road are very close, but don't actually touch (have a common vertex). The end result is that because there's a gap, you can't route directly between points a foot either side of the junction.

Take a look at the following route:
https://cycle.travel/map/journey/83697

A644 Albert Road (SE) connects to Chapel St, but neither connect to the A644 immediately to the NW of the junction.

Here is the other example I came across:
https://cycle.travel/map/journey/83737

A6139 Tuel Lane (S) connects to Milton St, but neither connect to the A6139 immediately to the N of the junction.

If it was ArcGIS or QGIS, I'd say someone had tried to digitise the two sections with snapping turned off.

[mjr]

I've just added tooltips to the 2D elevation display showing the height and gradient. So you can mouse-over the relevant bit of a climb and it'll say "124m · 5.4%" or similar. Obviously subject to the accuracy issues as currently being explored over in another thread, but I've been enjoying recreating the Vuelta climbs with it...

Yippee (in case I didn't say at the time). Could the tooltip appear somewhere (next to the red line on the elevation plot maybe?) if you mouseover the route while the 2D elevation plot is open, please? It would make it easier to see what's where.

[Richard Fairhurst]

Hi,
I love cycle.travel and use it pretty much every week to plan my club's "Monday Meander" however even for such a ride the routing around the Queensbury area of W. Yorks is just odd. Take a look at the following route:
https://cycle.travel/map/journey/83697
The two via points are my attempt to make the route follow the main road, but nothing seems to work. There seems to be some sort of disconnect in that bit of road. No idea if this is a cycle.travel problem or the base map sorry. I have noticed a few of these issues recently (much more so than before) so perhaps a recent change has introduced a problem?

This is fixed now! If you jiggle the via points around to force it to recalculate then it'll be fine. Tuel Lane will work, too, though you may need to add an extra via point - it's a 12% gradient and cycle.travel isn't a great fan of those. Thanks again for spotting this.

Couple of fixes today in the European routing too (recognising that cycling is permitted on 'trunk' roads in Scandinavia, and showing EuroVelo numbers better in the turn-by-turn instructions).

mjr - good idea, will look at that.

[EmmaS]

That looks really good. Going to give it a go. I just usually use OS Leisure mapping but with this there is more information. Thanks very much

[gloomyandy]

This is fixed now! If you jiggle the via points around to force it to recalculate then it'll be fine. Tuel Lane will work, too, though you may need to add an extra via point - it's a 12% gradient and cycle.travel isn't a great fan of those. Thanks again for spotting this.

Wow that's what I call service! Much appreciated!