Cycle Travel Question

[climo]

How do I get an Archie's campsite file into cycle.travel? I did this earlier but like an idiot (don't answer that!) I can't remember how. Been a bad day!

Answered my own question. Use the upload button - doh! To be fair I did try this but as I was uploading several countries sites it took for ever. One at a time seems to work.

[Bmblbzzz]

Richard, it seems that there might still be a problem with the country not appearing. I was attempting to create a route from Warsaw, Poland to Zamosc, Poland. When I enter Warsaw Poland was not offered as a choice. And the city of Zamosc did not come up at all.

Warsaw did come up when I typed it (but just "Warsaw" & then chose it from the list) but do bear in mind that that is the anglicised name for Warszawa. Commnon placenames like that will probably have their variants listed in the places database somewhere/somehow.

I'd never heard of Zamosc but found that it is actually Zamość (note the accents) & it is listed if you include the accents (I copied & pasted the name having done a Google search on Zamosc).

I was going to post the same. Slightly awkward perhaps for English users to have to put in the diacritics.

@Woodtourer, Zamość is beautiful and full of historical interest. If you enjoy it then two other towns you'll probably like in the same region are Sandomierz and Kazimierz Dolny. The latter not to be confused with the Kazimierz district of Kraków! (both are on the River Wisła and both have historic Jewish connections, but Kazimierz Donly retains its beauty).

Edit: I see CycleTravel actually routes you through Kazimierz Dolny. And through Nałęczów, a pleasant spa town with literary connections.

[Richard Fairhurst]

Fully agree on the diacritics thing. The geocoder (the bit of software that translates addresses into lat/longs) is one of the few bits in cycle.travel that I didn't write - it's a nifty bit of open-source code called Photon but it does have some limitations, of which this is one. Last May I contributed an improvement to it that'll make it ignore diacritics (https://github.com/komoot/photon/pull/330 for those of a technical bent) - I'm just waiting for the developers to issue a new release of the software with this included, and then I can install that and cycle.travel will stop fussing about diacritics. I've just now had a word with one of the developers so hopefully it won't be too long.

@climo - you shouldn't need to upload an Archies file: cycle.travel has all Archies' campsites integrated in the site (with kind permission). If you change the little "Hotel" menu on the left of the map to say "Camping", you can then use the "Find" button to show all campsites near your planned route, or just click one point in the route and choose "Nearby accommodation" in the pop-up bubble. Clicking an icon on the map will then show the contact number etc. from Archies.

[mjr]

I think you could more accurately describe c.t's use of "traffic-free" as Sustrans-ese vs council-ese, given that I volunteer for the former and not the latter.

I'm honestly not that fussed. I do take mjr and Vorpal's point that bikes are traffic too, but traffic-free seems to be the most widely understood term in British English (whenever I've manned Sustrans stalls at local festivals, for example, it's the word that people use when they're asking for somewhere to ride with the kids).

I thought Sustrans's officer at November's campaigning conference said they were phasing out use of the term, but I may have misunderstood a diplomatic answer to an audience which suffers the consequences of it.

Nothing's ideal: "motor-free" excludes e-bikes, "car-free" could technically describe a horrible bus lane on a busy London road, and then you start getting into things like "active travel route" which are just way too geeky for normal use.

Other terms are imperfect, but "traffic-free" is worse, except maybe for "off-road".

Maybe I'll just redraw the icons so they don't need tooltips!

Clearer icons would be good but hopefully they'll still have alt text.

[Bmblbzzz]

Regarding the icons, the "Traffic-free" and "Unpaved traffic-free" icons are extremely similar. The "cobbled" pattern that is obvious in the "Unpaved road" icon is obscured by the bike symbol, leaving the only clear difference as the absence of white line at the edges. Perhaps one could be made a different colour?

[Woodtourer]

It may have been asked but I can't find it.
Is it possible to print the Cue Sheet? If so how do I go about it?
Thanks!

[Woodtourer]

Found my answer! Boy am I quickly!! Appears the route has to be 300k or less to move to a PDF and print.

[MrsHJ]

Found my answer! Boy am I quickly!! Appears the route has to be 300k or less to move to a PDF and print.

I break my long route into daily sections. Having said that I don’t bother with a cue sheet but it could be a good idea ( probably not printed out for a longer tour though as it would probably end up being a Brick). I do sometimes not the sequence of roads down though and find that could help at an urgent moment of indecision when my garmin was on the blink.

[Sweep]

Can anyhow tell me how to sort this?

Minor irritation.

When I go to the opening page, pre-logging in, the site fills in, unasked, the destination field with one of my email addresses.

[Richard Fairhurst]

It's not the site doing that - it's your web browser. The input box is named "to" (because it's where you're going to...) and some web browser appears to have decided on a recent update that fields marked "to" should be prefilled with email addresses. It's really annoying - a good half of web development is working around idiocies in browsers like this (particularly in Google Chrome).

When I've finished some current work I'm doing, I'll rename it to something like "garglesquit" and that will presumably fix it until Chrome breaks it again...

[Sweep]

It's not the site doing that - it's your web browser. The input box is named "to" (because it's where you're going to...) and some web browser appears to have decided on a recent update that fields marked "to" should be prefilled with email addresses. It's really annoying - a good half of web development is working around idiocies in browsers like this (particularly in Google Chrome).

When I've finished some current work I'm doing, I'll rename it to something like "garglesquit" and that will presumably fix it until Chrome breaks it again...

Many thanks for the explanation Richard.
You are of course right - have just opened cycletravel in Firefox Focus and the issue isn't there.
Look forward to you kicking chrome into shape as that is what I use for most things.
Agree it is annoying - I recall one browser's insistence, not involving your great site, that a string of numbers was a phone number and endlessly trying to dial it.

[Warin61]

When I've finished some current work I'm doing, I'll rename it to something like "garglesquit" and that will presumably fix it until Chrome breaks it again...

Destination? (humm)
Goal? (for those of a sporting nature, or of questionable legality)
end? (a certain finality in that)
journey's end
target (bulls eye)

[Bmblbzzz]

What don't you like about destination?

[Richard Fairhurst]

New feature time!

The number one requested feature for cycle.travel (by a very very long chalk) has been route preferences, and in particular, the ability to stick to paved roads/paths only. I've held off because it would effectively mean renting a new high-powered server which wouldn't be cheap. But the other week I figured out a way to do it with less of a hardware impact, while still being just as fast.

So: you can now choose "paved only" when planning a route. Toggle that, and it'll stick to tarmac roads and cycleways. Everything else is still the same, so it still prefers quiet roads and tries to avoid steep hills, the round-trip and "suggest a route" options work, and so on.

One fun aspect is that you can actually switch between route types at each via point. So you might plan a route with the normal "paths & roads" selected, but choose to stay on tarmac for one short section to bypass a path you don't like. Just put via points in, click the first one, and choose "paved".


At the same time, I've added a little "donate" option to help cover the costs and so that I can justify the amount of time I spend on the site to Mrs F . There's absolutely no expectation that anyone should donate, but people do ask (which is very kind), and I'd far rather do this than plaster ads all over the map or require a subscription to access it. The donation is handled through Patreon which is a popular site for this sort of thing, and I'll send a little monthly newsletter to anyone who is kind enough to support the site.

[Bmblbzzz]

Very nice! I also note the "go direct to (next point/end)" option. Not sure what you'd use it for though?