New and improved bike routing, with low stress options
mapzen.com
mapzen.com
To go back to the first point there are issues with too much progress. It makes us lazy. Not enough and we might suffer. The balance is important.
I remember one anecdote about Northern African culture. They don't mass produce tech, instead they go with the flow and find solutions on the spot, by the means of a few tools. They say it's smarter to do it this way (maybe, maybe not), surely it keeps your mind creative.
Also, in dev circles, having too much compute power makes your solutions bad. Because you can just ignore the innefficiencies. Plus it's self feeding through the hardware market (more bloat, more sales)
My pick was the Brose mid-drive motor available in Tour 50nm/City 75nm/MTB 90nm models. I then bought an ex-demo one off model from a localish bike shop. https://www.ebike-manufaktur.com/en/e-bikes/11lf-shimano-deo...
Problem with battery meant it took 11 weeks to get it back on the road as the shop did not have a relationship with the bike manufacturer.
The bike however is phenomenal. I weigh 130kg and it takes me up ANY hill in Bath. There's a couple of 1 in 3s that I can cycle up one handed.
It's saved me an absolute fortune. In fact after owning it for a month, my wife wrote off my car. We just took the insurance money and didn't buy another car going down to a one car family.
I have a gold standard D-Lock that is side mounted on the frame (weight not an issue) that I use when parking up. There is also a dutch style rear wheel lock mounted to the frame I also use. The battery has a key that keeps it locked to the frame. The head unit for the eBike display is removable and I take that with me whenever I leave it locked up making the motor unusable.
Basically you're trying to steal a 25kg (55lb) bike with multiple security features and relatively unique electric parts that people would be wary of buying due to lack of guarantees.
Sometimes if I'm popping into a shop/café, I use the bike stand, lock using the dutch lock, and just take the head unit off. I'm guessing somebody could pull up in a van and just lift the bike but the opportunistic 'snatch' is so not going to get very far.
(Though if you don't need the e-thing 310€ will get you started)
As a way to get from A to B quickly, nothing beats them in a city.
I did an Air Pollution piece for the BBC comparing exposure of somebody walking, cycling, and driving in and around Bath. As the cyclist, they told me I was travelling around the city a bit too fast for the pollution monitor to get all my data correctly. ;)
I recommend spending $3k on a bike with a Yamaha or Bosch motor, it's easy to justify that crazy price if you look at the money you'll save in gas/payments/gym expenses. Most importantly, I enjoy my commute now and I feel like a part of the city in a way that car commuting doesn't give you. Also, get a pedal-assist bike not one with a hand throttle, trust me it's not better to have a throttle.
Disclaimer: My new startup is ebike related but I'm not going to be selling any bikes or hardware.
If you like your bike commute and don't mind getting sweaty you might prefer a normal bike.
On my eBike I'll happily explore hills without thinking about it. Given that my eBike is pedal-assist, you still have to work hard to get a top speed going up a hill but I no longer feel hills are a problem.
Goals
- get from A to B as quickly as possible
- get from A to B as safely as possible
- get from A to B as enjoyably as possible
Factors
- fitness of rider
- type of bike (Riding a fixed gear bike up a steep hill is bad for enjoyment, but riding a mountain bike up a steep hill is not)
- weather (headwinds, tailwinds affect time, affects safety of certain routes as well - don't tell me to ride down a steep windy hill when there is a possibility of ice)
- time of day (affects safety due to light levels)
- traffic volume
- number of lights/stop signs (this affects fast riders more than slow ones because of the effort wasted accelerating and braking is greater)
- number of turns (turns make the rider slow down and wait for traffic and also increase the complexity of following a route)
- scenery/environmental factors (eg. ride through an industrial area or through a waterfront park)
Anyone from Waze or Google Maps team here?
If you are in the US the data problem is likely an artifact of TIGER which has hundreds or thousands of miles of roads that are given a single generic class which ends up being pretty unreliable outside of developed areas.
I find myself constantly getting directions, then cancelling the navigation so I can once again see indicated bike lanes and adjust accordingly. A slight opacity on the route indicator would be a godsend.
The old route crossed two stop signs and did a left turn at a traffic signal. Left turns at traffic signals really suck.
The new, proper wiggle route is two left turns and a right turn, all at stop signs. Left turns at stop signs are not that much worse than going straight across -- and vastly better than a traffic light. Right turns are practically free.
So by simply rating the difficulty of intersections using a global metric, it seems like they could have made the same wiggle improvement without getting into rating each section of street. My point here is not that assessing things like accomodation_factor and road_stress are useless. Rather it appears that they've overlooked the much simpler, global improvement of rating intersections.
There's no good way to avoid them westbound, but we can be certain eastbound wiggle traffic will start taking Page to avoid the left turn at the Haight & Scott traffic light. And that's going to stress the notorious Scott & Page intersection even more. They're currently adding pedestrian safety improvements.[2] We'll see if it's enough.
Unless.. I wonder if timed bicycle signals would help make the traffic signal routes preferable. Not sure if it would work, but that would be a dream.. just flow through the wiggle unimpeded. I can't tell if they're considering it.
[1] https://www.sfmta.com/projects-planning/projects/wiggle-neig...
[2] https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/projects/2017/Wigg...
http://www.openstreetmap.org/directions?engine=mapzen_bicycl...
I checked the request, the JS powering the OSM feature isn't sending the parameters so they are probably the 0.25 defaults there.
If you're familiar with Leaflet, it's also pretty easy to draw routes in mapzen.js and pass different parameters to the router -- check the bottom of that post.
https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/blob/...
Will have to check out of the rest of the route vs what Google Maps has me doing now, though. I'm pretty happy with the current route but I'm new to this job so I've got a lot of route exploring to do.
In the case that it is, there could be some data error that breaks routing across it.
I am curious what sort of things you're searching for, and what you expect. Perhaps there's ways to fix it?
Remember, Google has considerably more money than OpenStreetMap.
The screenshots in the article would be more helpful if they were zoomed a little closer, at least enough to show all the street names being mentioned. A topo or shaded relief map would also help.
I'm glad people are working on this. The bike directions on Google maps aren't very good, IMO
I tried this out. My city is pretty notorious for having incomplete cycling infrastructure. i.e.) you get local areas that have cycle routes, but you often have to brave some craziness to get anywhere for real.
For my most common routes, it seems to be making the same choices as Google Maps. They definitely aren't the most optimal or comfortable choices, though I suspect this is at least partially a data problem. Steep grades, stairs, and difficult to find turns (more my city's fault that anything) are on the route, and it takes you though the straightforward but less safe connectors instead of detouring through neighbourhoods.
Perhaps one more tuning parameter is needed that would allow weighting stress vs distance?
I agree, but they are certainly better than nothing. There are so many times I have wished for a real-time, traffic sensitive routing feature on Google Maps when it comes to bikes.This usually happens around rush hour when I am pinned up against the shoulder trying to take the lane and being cursed and buzzed repeatedly.
I am also really glad people are working on this, it is really cool and so full of potential.
http://results.openaddresses.io/
There's a variety of reasons that such data hasn't made it to OSM (resources, licensing issues, disagreement about how it should be integrated, disagreement about whether it should be integrated, etc.)
Any chance it might eventually allow users to specify a single start/end point and a desired distance? That'd be much more useful for people who ride for sport, and even though there seem to be a few websites that generate such looped routes, they don't appear to do it particularly well.
- traffic - elevation gain - type of street - a way to represent the distance overhead compare the other segments.
Any framework / dev env where I could easily get that entry point and see the top results on a map?
Then it automatically built a route on some of the most heavily-traveled and bike-unfriendly roads in the area. (SF Peninsula locals: Marsh Road, Middlefield bike slaughter through Palo Alto). At least it only had a few turns. Google Maps did far, far better.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin
I guess the routing enabled bike maps will take advantage of whatever data is present.
BBBike supports custom areas:
Leaflet is a great library if you don't need much (use OpenLayers then).
The police have never hassled me for being on any road on a bike. But man, do the dudes in pickup trucks with truck nuts love to tell me to get off the road.
The most common type of bike accidents are cars failing to yield when turning or using driveways, and divided bike paths and sidewalks only make it worse.
I try to be super vigilant when crossing crosswalks and driveways when using the sidewalk, but pretty much all of the close calls I've had have been because I was riding moderately fast on the sidewalk.
Bikes are more like pedestrians than like cars.
The roads google maps instructs me to take for their bicycle directions are not bicycle friendly. I am directed to take a narrow road with just one lane on each side with motorists going 55 mph, even though there is heavy traffic and no room for motorists to safely pass.
It seems like google maps is optimizing for road incline instead of safety. I resorted to using their pedestrian routing to get a route with sidewalks, but of course then it doesn't take road incline into account. No E-bike here. And then oddly enough, the other day their pedestrian routing sent me through A CONSTRUCTION ZONE. That path was definitely not bike friendly or pedestrian friendly.
Google maps' bicycle directions never send me down a greenway, it always wants me to be right beside cars. If I have already biked 10 miles, you really don't want me to be right beside cars, as my bicycling becomes more unsteady as I become more tired.
We don't route on sidewalks, and will avoid paths that are tagged `bicycle=no`. You can get a sense of these on our bike map. https://mapzen.com/bikes/
This kid is pretty cool.