Cycle Travel Question

[Richard Fairhurst]

Ah, interesting. I've just tweaked this and it should now be able to search for placenames in English, French, German or Italian, depending on what your language is set to. (The language setting usually comes from the browser but you can also set it manually on your profile page.)

The searching is done using a piece of software called Photon (originally developed by Komoot, funnily enough, though I don't think they've done anything on it for a long time); the precompiled data dump for that, which is what I use, includes those four languages. I should probably work on Peter and Sarah, who provide the data dump, to persuade them to add Spanish!

[Angstrom]

I've just tweaked this and it should now be able to search for placenames in English, French, German or Italian, depending on what your language is set to.

Brilliant. It does work now with French place names.
That was quick! Thank you!

[Angstrom]

Hi Richard. I participate in forums where folks regularly ask for advice on a recommended route from A to B. I love to simply be able to quickly create a route and share it via a url. CT allows me to do this via the "link to this place", which I copy and paste. Only problem, as it stands, the url is built up with the "From" and "To location but any "via" points that might have been placed in between are omitted. Not what I'd need.
My solution is to save and share with CT or use BRouter which does this very well. Sometimes I do one, sometimes the other (lazy). I'd love to share via CT all the time since I think it's the best routing engine and think your site deserves to grow in user base.
Do you think that could be included in your roadmap (if you find it useful)?
Thanks.

[richardfm]

Hi Richard. I participate in forums where folks regularly ask for advice on a recommended route from A to B. I love to simply be able to quickly create a route and share it via a url. CT allows me to do this via the "link to this place", which I copy and paste. Only problem, as it stands, the url is built up with the "From" and "To location but any "via" points that might have been placed in between are omitted. Not what I'd need.
My solution is to save and share with CT or use BRouter which does this very well. Sometimes I do one, sometimes the other (lazy). I'd love to share via CT all the time since I think it's the best routing engine and think your site deserves to grow in user base.
Do you think that could be included in your roadmap (if you find it useful)?
Thanks.

I second this

[Richard Fairhurst]

I've always been a little nervous about doing that - if a route gets shared a lot, then sharing a link containing the waypoints is more work on the server (which has to recalculate afresh each time) than sharing a saved route (which is stored in the database without the need to recalculate it).

But on reflection, I could probably do it now that I've added the ability not to show the turn-by-turn instructions - believe it or not, it actually takes more processing work to calculate those than it does to calculate the route itself. And if there's one super-popular route that gets shared I could always look at caching it anyway. I'll have a look at adding it over the next few days.

[Angstrom]

I've always been a little nervous about doing that - if a route gets shared a lot, then sharing a link containing the waypoints is more work on the server (which has to recalculate afresh each time) than sharing a saved route (which is stored in the database without the need to recalculate it).

But on reflection, I could probably do it now that I've added the ability not to show the turn-by-turn instructions - believe it or not, it actually takes more processing work to calculate those than it does to calculate the route itself. And if there's one super-popular route that gets shared I could always look at caching it anyway. I'll have a look at adding it over the next few days.

I understand your concerns, of course, Richard. As far as I'm concerned, I can guarantee that it won't be shared "massively".
However more generally, to prevent that risk, another way around that (if you find it is a problem) is to create a link with a "use by date" (encoding the creation date for instance) allowing this feature to be by nature a way to temporarily share routes, forcing anyone wanting to share more permanently to save the route and share it like it is done now. You should rename the link in the UI something else than "permalink" in that case.

[st599_uk]

I've always been a little nervous about doing that - if a route gets shared a lot, then sharing a link containing the waypoints is more work on the server (which has to recalculate afresh each time) than sharing a saved route (which is stored in the database without the need to recalculate it).

But on reflection, I could probably do it now that I've added the ability not to show the turn-by-turn instructions - believe it or not, it actually takes more processing work to calculate those than it does to calculate the route itself. And if there's one super-popular route that gets shared I could always look at caching it anyway. I'll have a look at adding it over the next few days.

Is there not a risk then that the route you shared, is not the route your mate gets as a change in the data the routing algorithm is running on, or a change in the routing algorithm itself could create a new route?

[Richard Fairhurst]

There is - though the routing algorithm only changes gently. If you expressly save a route then it saves the exact course at the time you plotted it, so there's always that option.

[Richard Fairhurst]

A couple of changes to via points:

They're now a little smaller on-screen: they're small blue circles rather than "pin" shapes. I was increasingly aware that the old ones could really obscure the route on the map, particularly if you were zoomed out, or were planning a route with lots of via points around a dense city. But I've put an invisible margin in there, so they're still the same clickable width as before - i.e. you don't have to aim your mouse/finger any more precisely.

Second, cycle.travel has always had an (unwritten) limit of around 70 via points per route. This is now a lot higher - I've tested it with 120+ points and it's happy. I've tested it with an entire EuroVelo route (EV19) of 120 via points, and it's very happy with it. I wouldn't have thought anyone would have hit the existing limit, but I've had a few emails from people who have - including one user who was using it to plot incredibly intricate lockdown routes around their city!

Both of these are partly to prepare for some more fun new stuff coming in the next few weeks, but more of that anon.

[Woodtourer]

Now you've wetted my appetite!!

[Angstrom]

Good improvements Richard.
I did notice the changed icons for waypoints and like them.
About the increased number of waypoint limit, it's a good thing although as you write, the previous one only rarely caused problems. I once hit a ceiling when I endeavoured to map published in 1898 in the Guide "L'Auvergne et les causses des Cévennes" by Adrien de Baroncelli, which was given to me by a friend who'd randomly found it whilst disposing of old stuff stored in an attic. I haven't finished it but might now go back to it.
I thought it'd be interesting to ride this tour 125 years later... It's a more than 1250 Km randonnée.

I don't know if the following point was raised before but I hope that future upgrade of CT will allow to create a new sort of waypoint: a stop-over (or stage). The idea would be to make it easier to plan a multi-day journey. If a waypoint could be spec'ed as a stop-over, it'd be way easier to chnage where a stop takes place, without having to re-plan stages independently. I think your increasing the length of route that CT can handle is a pre-requisite for this and now that you've done it, maybe it'd be a good time to put that feature in.

Incidentally Richard, I think such good and non-trivial improvement could be communicated on the CT forum and not only here. CT is gaining users world-wide and few of the non-British users are coming here to check news out.

I do hope that the glimpse of French that I saw on CT for a couple of hours are just a spoiler for what's coming up.

[gloomyandy]

Hi Richard,
is cycle.travel broken at the moment. I seem to get a blank space on the right hand side (where the map normally is) when trying to view a route or when simply going to the "Map" page. I've tried it on a couple of computers and it seems to be the same on both.

Thanks

[gloomyandy]

Ah seems to be working again now!

[Richard Fairhurst]

Quick hiccup during a site update!

[Vantage]

There's a bit of weirdness going on with my etrex 30x and cycle.travel that I hope someone else has had and fixed.
I'll give a detailed list of what I do so my issue is clear below.

Plot cycle.travel route on pc/chromebook.
Download to pc/chromebook as a gpx route.
Upload gpx route to the gpx file directory in the etrex.
Turn on the etrex and choose the "cycle.travel" route from the 'track manager' .
Click on it and then click 'View Map' which sometimes causes it to freeze.
When the freeze ends, I'll get a 'Loading track with elevation data from the map' message. This message sits on the screen a very long time, I times it the other day and it lasted 4.30 mins!
After that it'll play nice and I can get on with riding my route.

It only does this with a cycle.travel file as I've tried others like GPSies, bike hike etc.
If I load the cycle.travel gpx file into a gpsies/bike hike site, save it and then download, it works OK.

Any help here would be very much appreciated.