Cycle Travel Question

[Richard Fairhurst]

I think the full range of options are now there in the new mobile interface (I've just added undo), albeit in different places to the desktop. I found that maintaining the popup option was getting difficult (any time I'd make a change to the desktop version, it'd affect the popup in inconsistent ways), and it wasn't really intuitive enough for new users. Ultimately I plan to have native apps as a smoother, faster option anyway, of course!

[RickH]

I think the full range of options are now there in the new mobile interface (I've just added undo), albeit in different places to the desktop. I found that maintaining the popup option was getting difficult (any time I'd make a change to the desktop version, it'd affect the popup in inconsistent ways), and it wasn't really intuitive enough for new users. Ultimately I plan to have native apps as a smoother, faster option anyway, of course!

Thanks. I appreciate all the work you do on this & it is my favorite route planner thes days. Despite my occasional gripes - I know I will have to work hard to beat it into submission when I do want to ride the A49 (40mph dual carriageway, main access road from M62) into, out of or through Warrington!

[Angstrom]

So I bought an Android phone!

Great!! Thank you Richard.

Would other members of this forum consider inappropriate my pointing to those who do use CT regularly and haven't noticed yet that they can join the Patreon crowd? Richard obviously can't write this but I feel I can (if not, let me know).
I think such a useful & freely accessible tool backed by a listening and active developer is worth something in return at one point, IMHO.
As we can see (and imagine easily), it does cost to support us (an Android phone being probably one of the smallest expense, actually).
We all have things we'd like to see implemented in the future (although less and less, admittedly) so it might be a more selfish move than it looks, on the long run.

Long version: cycle.travel uses a wonderful piece of software called Leaflet to actually display the map on-screen, as do thousands of other websites. It turns out that Leaflet's double-tap handling on Android has been broken for years. There is a new version of Leaflet which might fix it, but said version also breaks lots of things in Safari, both on desktop and on mobile. (That's why a bunch of functionality on openstreetmap.org doesn't work on Safari right now.) When there's a Leaflet version that works fine on both I'll move to that, and that'll enable double-tapping to work on Android.

Libraries and toolkits: most often friends, sometimes foes.

[LittleGreyCat]

Just a drive by posting.

I tried cycle.travel for the first time on my new(ish) 43" 4k screen using Waterfox.

Stunning for planning routes, but when I dragged the map to do the next segment (in a high resolution) the web page seemed to go to sleep for a few seconds.

I don't think it is my laptop, not expecting it to be Waterfox (but you never know).
Network bandwidth is good. 200 Mbit/sec VM cable.
My first suspicion is that I an overloading the server at the far end which is doing the rendering.
Oh, W10 Task Manager shows I have RAM to spare and plenty of CPU to spare.

Do I need to pass the hat round for some more RAM for the server?

[Richard Fairhurst]

Yep - if the map area hasn't been rendered recently then it'll take a couple of seconds to render it afresh. The high-resolution tiles (which show up on newer displays) are particularly slow to generate, I think largely because of the time it takes to scale the hill-shading.

I'll probably upgrade the map server next year to something faster and, crucially, with more storage. Right now I'm wrestling with a hardware foulup on the box that generates the routing though! (A long, involved story which starts with Hermes posting a hard drive through a letterbox...)

It does cache the maps on the server, so next time you view the same area, it should be quicker.

[LittleGreyCat]

Ta.
Informative as usual.

[mikeymo]

While you're there Richard, this looks a bit odd:


that's from 53.8753,-1.5387 to 53.8764,-1.5574

and here's what it looks like on Google Street View:



You can maybe see that the road that Cycle Travel seems determined to avoid is suitable for bikes, and in fact is part of the West Yorkshire Cycle Route, which I think used to be one of the NCN routes. I wonder, has the demotion* of NCN routes changed your routing algorithm or something?

In fact it's not possible to position the start or finish pins anywhere along that stretch of road. It's as though CycleTravel doesn't think there's a road there. Fine in Bikemap, Google maps.

*I say "demotion" I haven't really been following it that closely, I'm not particularly interested. But I saw something about some changes to NCN routes.

[Richard Fairhurst]

Someone has, for reasons I find hard to fathom, put a really weird "MTB scale" tag on that road in OSM ("0-", whatever that's meant to mean). cycle.travel doesn't recognise it so assumes it's an impassable mountain bike route. I'll take a look.

[mikeymo]

Someone has, for reasons I find hard to fathom, put a really weird "MTB scale" tag on that road in OSM ("0-", whatever that's meant to mean). cycle.travel doesn't recognise it so assumes it's an impassable mountain bike route. I'll take a look.

Thanks. There doesn't seem to be the MTB:Scale tag there anymore. Maybe that was you who removed it? Though Cycle Travel still does the same thing. Maybe it takes a while to update?

The rest of that road is exactly as per Street View, though with the odd pothole. Very popular with cyclists as it's almost completely traffic free and gets us from the north Leeds suburbs to some nice quiet lanes.

It might seem a bit odd of me to be using Cycle.Travel to find routes I already know, but it's my current method to "test" cycle route planners. Especially on certain specific sections that are "problematic" - there's another section near there which Cycle Streets thinks is passable on a touring bike, as does Komoot, which definitely isn't.

Thanks for your work.

[thirdcrank]

While you're there Richard, this looks a bit odd:


that's from 53.8753,-1.5387 to 53.8764,-1.5574 ....

There's quite a bit of history to the stretch of the West Yorkshire Cycle Route in that screen shot from the new park-and-ride at one end to the new site of Leeds Grammar School at the other.

The bit being queried here runs near Eccup Reservoir which used to belong to Leeds City Council when the WYCR was devised by the West Yorkshire County Council just as it was being abolished. In those days, municipal waterboards tended to ban any public access to their land so there was a very nice but private road just where it was ideal for the cycle route. This meant that in theory at least, the route took to the fields, for want of a better expression. That was a bit academic anyway, because those responsible for the route didn't want to encourage inexperienced riders onto the roads so it received little publicity and discreet signage which only covered anti-clockwise.

In the heady days of the Notional Cycling Strategy, some of us persuaded the five local authorities to sign the route properly in both directions and to publicise it: that resulted in a rather natty map based on the OS.

By then, water had been privatised and Yorkshire Water took a different line on public access. I've tried unsuccessfully to cut a long story short but I'll guess that ownership of that stretch of lovely cycling road is involved here.

[Richard Fairhurst]

Thanks. There doesn't seem to be the MTB:Scale tag there anymore. Maybe that was you who removed it?

It was!

Though Cycle Travel still does the same thing. Maybe it takes a while to update?

Yes, it does. The routing takes a couple of days to calculate. I usually run an update every month or so though I've had a couple of hardware issues in the last few weeks (long story).

[tomshooter]

At a first glance this looks excellent! I normally use Strava to plot routes (in conjunction with the odd zoom in to Google maps), but it's always good to cross reference with other sites. Thanks for sharing!

[LittleGreyCat]

Just a quick check.

I recently loaded a route from Komoot onto my Garmin and all was well.
However Komoot warned:
"Includes segments in which cycling is forbidden

You will have to dismount and push your bike."

This made me wonder if I imported the GPX file to Cycle Travel that the route would be automatically recalculated or if it would be imported exactly as described.
I think I am thinking of a "read only" import option.
Useful for creating an exact copy of a route from other mapping software before deciding whether to unlock it to work on it.

[richardfm]

Just a quick check.

I recently loaded a route from Komoot onto my Garmin and all was well.
However Komoot warned:
"Includes segments in which cycling is forbidden

You will have to dismount and push your bike."

This made me wonder if I imported the GPX file to Cycle Travel that the route would be automatically recalculated or if it would be imported exactly as described.
I think I am thinking of a "read only" import option.
Useful for creating an exact copy of a route from other mapping software before deciding whether to unlock it to work on it.

That's an interesting thought. I had forgotten that there was an upload option. The following two points on the upload page give some clues as to what might happen if you try it now.

• It will be more successful with the sort of route that cycle.travel would plan for you - i.e. not along really busy roads or mountain bike tracks
• The generated journey may not be 100% as you rode it

[LittleGreyCat]

Just a quick check.

I recently loaded a route from Komoot onto my Garmin and all was well.
However Komoot warned:
"Includes segments in which cycling is forbidden

You will have to dismount and push your bike."

This made me wonder if I imported the GPX file to Cycle Travel that the route would be automatically recalculated or if it would be imported exactly as described.
I think I am thinking of a "read only" import option.
Useful for creating an exact copy of a route from other mapping software before deciding whether to unlock it to work on it.

That's an interesting thought. I had forgotten that there was an upload option. The following two points on the upload page give some clues as to what might happen if you try it now.

• It will be more successful with the sort of route that cycle.travel would plan for you - i.e. not along really busy roads or mountain bike tracks
• The generated journey may not be 100% as you rode it

Ta.

Now wondering if it worth a feature request, or just me thinking of edge cases as usual.
In this particular case, as I had the Komoot link I could look at the original loop.
Just thinking about being presented with a GPX file and loading it up to look at it and finding out later "What you think you heard is not what I meant."

By the way, the route took in a farm road which was ""No entry without permission" and so not a right of way.
Ride leader had obtained permission.
Could Cycle Travel manage this?
That is, plot a route along a road or track which was not shown as a right of way?