Cycle Travel Question

Cycle-touring, Expeditions, Adventures, Major cycle routes NOT LeJoG (see other special board)
Jdsk
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Re: Cycle Travel Question

Post by Jdsk »

simonineaston wrote: 1 Mar 2023, 4:03pmSiri is set to UK female.
...
Didn't Apple remove any default voice in 2021?

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simonineaston
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Re: Cycle Travel Question

Post by simonineaston »

That subtlety had passed me by - along with many other subtleties, I'm afraid! but it looks like you're right.
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MrsHJ
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Re: Cycle Travel Question

Post by MrsHJ »

simonineaston wrote: 1 Mar 2023, 4:03pm
I'll look into that - which voice do you usually use?
Siri is set to UK female. That selection seems to carry through to most other apps that have a voice. I didn't see Siri as a bloke. I wonder is there's a gender split for Siri's voice ie most blokes imagining she's female and most women prefering a man's voice. I remember a colleague had her satnav set to bloke, her comment being she rather fancied he sounded like George Clooney.
I have the iPad set to Australian woman and the iPhone set to Irish man (seriously, has been set like this for a long time).
Richard Fairhurst
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Re: Cycle Travel Question

Post by Richard Fairhurst »

One thing I would very much like to do is make the voice country-sensitive, so if you're following a route in France it'd say

(English voice) Turn left onto
(French voice) Rue de la Republique

At present it's all in English and makes an absolute dog's breakfast of the French pronunciation. But that'll require a bit of head-scratching to figure out.
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simonineaston
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Re: Cycle Travel Question

Post by simonineaston »

I thought you were going to suggest the traditional solution to the problem of the Brit. abroad - that the app would continue to speak English, but simply shout louder... :wink:
Last edited by simonineaston on 2 Mar 2023, 8:42pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Jdsk
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Re: Cycle Travel Question

Post by Jdsk »

Richard Fairhurst wrote: 2 Mar 2023, 1:52pm One thing I would very much like to do is make the voice country-sensitive, so if you're following a route in France it'd say

(English voice) Turn left onto
(French voice) Rue de la Republique
...
With a pause in between, as with "Zimbabwe" and "Khomeini"?

: - )

Jonathan
mattheus
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Re: Cycle Travel Question

Post by mattheus »

Richard Fairhurst wrote: 2 Mar 2023, 1:52pm One thing I would very much like to do is make the voice country-sensitive, so if you're following a route in France it'd say

(English voice) Turn left onto
(French voice) Rue de la Republique
Are you familiar with the work of Rob Hatch??
Richard Fairhurst
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Re: Cycle Travel Question

Post by Richard Fairhurst »

I'm not sure the iPhone could quite match the various pronunciations of Mr Hatch!
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mattheus
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Re: Cycle Travel Question

Post by mattheus »

Jdsk wrote: 2 Mar 2023, 2:33pm
Richard Fairhurst wrote: 2 Mar 2023, 1:52pm One thing I would very much like to do is make the voice country-sensitive, so if you're following a route in France it'd say

(English voice) Turn left onto
(French voice) Rue de la Republique
...
With a pause in between, as with "Zimbabwe" and "Khomeini"?

: - )

Jonathan
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WEBH
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Re: Cycle Travel Question

Post by WEBH »

Shades of Steven Toast..
Richard Fairhurst
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Re: Cycle Travel Question

Post by Richard Fairhurst »

Couple of comments over in the Cycling UK journey-planner thread about the gravel/off-road routing, but because they're really about c.t's routing choices I thought it'd be easier to answer them over here...
Nearholmer wrote: 28 Feb 2023, 8:52pmCycleTravel continues to pick needlessly long off-road routes within or through Milton Keynes, where I suspect it sort of gives up a bit (runs out of node-testing space?) because there are zillions to choose from.
First of all - I think there's a bit of terminology confusion here. What cycle.travel calls "gravel", and Cycling UK calls "off-road" (it's the same routing), is unpaved routing. It's off-road as in bumpy, not off-road as in traffic-free. For traffic-free paved routes around Milton Keynes you should use c.t's standard routing option, which prefers traffic-free paths in any case.

The challenge with unpaved routing is that, for most A-B journeys in the UK, the shortest (decent) cyclable route will mostly be on-road. Outside a few areas, we simply don't have the network of legally cyclable unpaved roads and paths that you might find in (say) the States or some parts of Europe.

So a routing option that thinks "unpaved paths are ok, and paved paths/roads are ok too" will basically mostly stay on the roads. That's especially the case when you take gradient into account.

c.t takes the view that if you've selected "gravel", you expressly don't want a route that stays on-road. As a result, it'll go further out of its way to get some off-roading in. So LEJOG with c.t's standard routing is 1010 miles, but in gravel mode it's 1250. For a shorter journey, or one in an area with few off-road options, this does mean you'll get funny loops sometimes. Sometimes the funny loops are too funny and it goes too far out of its way - that's something I'm working on but it's a Hard Problem!

SimonCelsa wrote: 28 Feb 2023, 8:30pm Just tried a quick test route from Inverness to Findhorn - just a random choice of places close to home.

Strangely, using cycle.travel off road it routed me across Findhorn Bay. I'm fairly sure there's not a ferry running or a newly constructed bridge in the vicinity, and I don't think the tide ever gets that low even at spring low water.
There's a ferry marked in OpenStreetMap (where c.t gets its data from) - it's https://www.north58.co.uk/water-taxi.html . The OSM data is https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/514967551 which expressly says it carries bikes. I had a quick google and https://www.flickr.com/photos/tedandjen/9041816555 came up. Looks fairly basic!

jgurney wrote: 4 Mar 2023, 12:58am Pretty good as online planners go. It did not make the errors that I have known several other make.
Unless set to 'fast' it tends to pick absurdly roundabout routes.

Some specific local issues I noticed:

- it treats Hammersmith Bridge in London as non-existent. This is open to pedestrians and makes a useful dismounted route.

- it does not alert users when it plots routes through parks, etc, which are closed at night.

- it sometimes plots routes along bridleways which are in fact mudbaths impractical as cycle routes (e.g. fropm Castle Cary to Hornblotton Green in Somerset, it recommends a very muddy bridleway instead of a slightly longer tarmac route). However it also sometimes avoids bridleways which have a good easily-cyclable surface.

- it occasionally marks 'cyclepaths' which do not exist at all or which are wholly within private property with no public access (e.g. it shows one such near Goldborough, N. Yorks, which is actually a dead-end farm track, and another inside the ICI works at Wilton, Teeside).
I think most of these are OSM data issues. Hammersmith Bridge didn't have very good connections at either end - I've fixed that in OSM so c.t will pick it up on the next update.

For the Castle Cary route, I'm not sure if I'm looking at the same paths, but if so there isn't any surface information in OSM, so c.t doesn't know it's muddy: hopefully someone local will be able to add the surface information to OSM so c.t can make a more informed choice. The ICI works is misleading tagging in OSM - I'll look at whether c.t needs to do anything but it wouldn't route you through there anyway so it's fairly immaterial. :) I can't see the cycle path you refer to near Goldsborough I'm afraid, but I might be missing something obvious - could you point me to where it is?
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Nearholmer
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Re: Cycle Travel Question

Post by Nearholmer »

c.t takes the view that if you've selected "gravel", you expressly don't want a route that stays on-road.
Which is greatly appreciated by those of us who delight in “English Gravel” (i.e. often mostly mud around here).

The odd thing that it’s doing in MK is defaulting onto paved cycleways when there are bridleways in parallel, in fact interlacing, with them. I suspect that OSM doesn’t know about some of the paths, and I suspect that OS misses quite a few because they seem to be permissive (shown on council published cycling maps as cycle paths, but on OS as footpaths).

The “big loop” thing locally seems to involve it liking one particular cross-city paved cycle path above all others, and going “up, across and down” in order to use it, rather than simply going “across”.

If you need any local knowledge about paths in and around MK, I’d be delighted to help - I use them almost every day. This shows the three levels of cycle paths, but omits the bridleways, and it is slightly out of date - more has been added! https://getaroundmk.org.uk/wp-content/u ... Poster.pdf

This shows bridleways in green (but they are not the same things as the green paths on the other map, which are hard-surfaced).
971398C5-3E5F-484E-8C10-AD99D06CBD46.jpeg
Richard Fairhurst
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Re: Cycle Travel Question

Post by Richard Fairhurst »

At a cursory look I think there might be some OSM data issues there - the first one I checked is marked in OSM as only being accessible via a pedestrian-only footpath, for example.
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Nearholmer
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Re: Cycle Travel Question

Post by Nearholmer »

You’re right, that could be what the problem is!

Having looked closer, OSM is riddled with erroneous coding on these MK cycle paths, showing a great many sections as footpaths …. It’s all over the city.

No wonder there are routing difficulties ….. the path it defaults to could be the nearest/only one coded continuously as cycleway.
LittleGreyCat
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Re: Cycle Travel Question

Post by LittleGreyCat »

Quick question - Route 51 between Godmanchester and St Ives.

I was just looking for routes in the area and coming in from the West past Grapham Water with Route 12, Route 15 seems to stop at Godmanchester and then start again at St. Ives.

Is this a bug or a feature? :D
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