Cycle Travel Question

Cycle-touring, Expeditions, Adventures, Major cycle routes NOT LeJoG (see other special board)
Richard Fairhurst
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Joined: 2 Mar 2008, 4:57pm
Location: Charlbury, Oxfordshire

Re: Cycle Travel question!

Post by Richard Fairhurst »

1. Yes - on the to-do list.
2. At present the auto-selection is city for under 25k, local for under 100k, touring and long-distance for over 15k. Scales are roughly 1:12,500 for city, 1:25,000 for local, 1:75,000 for touring, 1:125,000 for long distance.
3. It's something I want to look at but getting the bounding boxes right is fiendishly hard. Probably the next thing I'll do is add "fill A3" and "fill A4" options so that you can have a ride on one sheet (similar to the area maps, but with a line superimposed on them).
cycle.travel - maps, journey-planner, route guides and city guides
Bmblbzzz
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Re: Cycle Travel question!

Post by Bmblbzzz »

Thanks. That all sounds positive! :D And I've no doubt getting software to work out how to put a wiggly line on a rectangular sheet of paper in the most efficient way is not at all easy.
Bmblbzzz
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Re: Cycle Travel question!

Post by Bmblbzzz »

I just tried planning a route from home (Bristol) to SGS Filton (a college) and was impressed that the database interpreted this correctly, no street address needed. :D That will be useful if my son ends up there next year (just been to an open day). However, I found it curious that it sent me up Wordsworth Road and Eighth Avenue rather than the parallel, traffic free and tarmac surfaced Concorde Way. It certainly knows about the Concorde Way, it's marked and has sent me up there on other routes. Presumably it regards the footbridge at Filton Abbey Wood station as private property? Or penalises it because it's pedestrian only? And also penalises the shared-use pavement on the short stretch of A4174 as too far?
Richard Fairhurst
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Location: Charlbury, Oxfordshire

Re: Cycle Travel question!

Post by Richard Fairhurst »

That's incredibly finely balanced - the difference between cycle.travel's scoring for the two routes is less than 1%! I think it's mostly due to the bridges being marked "cyclists dismount", or in the case of the path from Filton Abbey Wood to Emma-Chris Way, "no bikes at all". But there's hardly anything in it.
cycle.travel - maps, journey-planner, route guides and city guides
Bmblbzzz
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Re: Cycle Travel question!

Post by Bmblbzzz »

Thanks, it's obviously a rather sophisticated routing algorithm. (In practice I'd probably just tell him to ride carefully or push over the station footbridge and down the ramp to Emma-Chris Way, as he's quite traffic adverse and I think that ramp is okay as long as it's not too busy. But I understand that the map has to place a ban on it!)
Richard Fairhurst
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Joined: 2 Mar 2008, 4:57pm
Location: Charlbury, Oxfordshire

Re: Cycle Travel question!

Post by Richard Fairhurst »

A couple of new features...

The elevation graph now flattens out if you go through a tunnel or over a major bridge - for example, the Two Tunnels route in Bath, or the Severn Bridge. This makes the estimated total climb more accurate, as well as the graph itself. You'll still see a slight incline sometimes, usually because one end of the tunnel/bridge is in an embankment/cutting that isn't reflected in the elevation data. But generally it's much more accurate. The actual route calculation has always been tunnel/bridge-aware so this doesn't affect that, just the display.

(I did permit myself a slight chuckle that "Flatten Elevation" is a paid-for premium feature on RideWithGPS and it's not even automatic - you have to find the tunnel and adjust it yourself!)

Second, if you're planning a route in Germany or Austria, you'll now get a Mapillary link in the pop-up bubble rather than a Google Street View one. Mapillary has much better coverage in these countries. The link isn't quite so slick - when the page loads, assuming Mapillary has coverage, you'll need to click a green circle in the Mapillary map (bottom left hand) to see the imagery. If you want to see Mapillary imagery in other countries - they have good coverage of some off-road EuroVelo routes, for example - then you can right-click the route instead of left-clicking (or command-click on a Mac), and the link will change.
cycle.travel - maps, journey-planner, route guides and city guides
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mjr
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Location: Norfolk or Somerset, mostly
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Re: Cycle Travel question!

Post by mjr »

Great on those features!

Is there any way to search the map for the N most recent routes in the current map view? Maybe just those with start points in the view? The word search box seems too vulnerable to abbreviations and typos to find some useful routes.
MJR, mostly pedalling 3-speed roadsters. KL+West Norfolk BUG incl social easy rides http://www.klwnbug.co.uk
All the above is CC-By-SA and no other implied copyright license to Cycle magazine.
Psamathe
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Re: Cycle Travel question!

Post by Psamathe »

One of the really useful "bonus" features of cycle.travel (i.e. beyond creating good routes) is the altitude profiles/ascent estimates. As raised previously (or elsewhere) these suffer badly through mountainous territory e.g. EV6 through eastern France. Using a altitude grid there seems little that can be done about this. But one thought which you may or may not consider worth the effort would be to request recorded tracks from people cycling such routes which have recorded altitudes. Some devices include altitude sensors and whilst the absolute altitude might be questionable, the relative altitude (relative to start point) averaged over several/many recorded tracks would give a much better altitude profile for popular cycle routes. I appreciate there are challenges (e.g. the work to implement) and I guess you'd need some way from the recorded gpx to identify the source of the altitude data (some software recoding uses altitudes calculated from the grid altitude points which is no help!).

The other slight negative of such a feature is consistency e.g. comparing two routes, route a has ascent of 200m and route b an ascent of 600m where route a ascent is using altitude data from recorded gpx's and route b interpolation and reality is route b might actually have lower ascent (e.g. canal path route).

Just thinking aloud.

Ian
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Peter Molog
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Location: The Netherlands

Re: Cycle Travel question!

Post by Peter Molog »

I'm trying to upload some tracks to Cycle.travel.
The process keeps getting stuck. I get the message:

Sorry
Couldn't find any likely roads or trails: Query string malformed close to position 1212


where the number is always different.

They are tracks I made myself. To check, have a track made by cycle.travel. Downloaded it. After that I try to upload it again.
However, I get the same error message again.
Am I doing something wrong, or is there an error in the system?

In the past I uploaded my own tracks, and that was never a problem.

Peter
Peter

Please, excuse my English. I'm Dutch.
Richard Fairhurst
Posts: 2030
Joined: 2 Mar 2008, 4:57pm
Location: Charlbury, Oxfordshire

Re: Cycle Travel question!

Post by Richard Fairhurst »

Ah, I see. Is that any better now?
cycle.travel - maps, journey-planner, route guides and city guides
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Peter Molog
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Location: The Netherlands

Re: Cycle Travel question!

Post by Peter Molog »

Richard Fairhurst wrote:Ah, I see.

Yes, it works again!
Thanks for the quick reply.
Peter

Please, excuse my English. I'm Dutch.
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Sweep
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Re: Cycle Travel question!

Post by Sweep »

Apologies if asked before.
I understand that the key for the maps is a pop up that can be accessed from the top right of the map but that some browser settings block this.
Mine does.
Would it be possible to also have this as a downloadable pdf?
I would find it very handy.
Sweep
Richard Fairhurst
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Joined: 2 Mar 2008, 4:57pm
Location: Charlbury, Oxfordshire

Re: Cycle Travel question!

Post by Richard Fairhurst »

Oh, that's a little exasperating. Which browser?
cycle.travel - maps, journey-planner, route guides and city guides
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Sweep
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Re: Cycle Travel question!

Post by Sweep »

Ignore me richard
I normally use chrome on a chromebook and have just spotted that it's there
duh!
My ageing eyes didn't spot the very small link.
It is just possible that there is an issue on my android tab due to its settings but probably not judging by my above stupidity - no matter anyway (to me) if there is on that - will try to report on that when reunited with it.

As you were - it is a great cycling resource for sure.
Sweep
richardfm
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Joined: 15 Apr 2018, 3:17pm
Location: Cardiff, Wales

Re: Cycle Travel question!

Post by richardfm »

Sweep wrote:Apologies if asked before.
I understand that the key for the maps is a pop up that can be accessed from the top right of the map but that some browser settings block this.
Mine does.
Would it be possible to also have this as a downloadable pdf?
I would find it very handy.

I've never noticed that link before, so thank you for that.
However, it didn't answer one thing that has been puzzling me. A route I have just created is shown partly as a purple line and partly as a green line. What do these represent? The route summary shows 4 different (in this case) types of road/cycle way surface, so I expected four colours for the route to show me busy roads, paved roads, traffic free and unpaved traffic free
Richard M
Cardiff
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