Comment by systemtest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by systemtest | Hacker News Reader

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I ride motorcycles in cross-Europe trips for fun but prefer the GPS. My GPS will look for small twisty mountain roads with lots of elevation changes and lots of corners. Roads that are only on highly detailed local maps, and I don't want to carry 30 maps on a month long road trip. Road signage is simply not a thing on these roads as they are only used by locals. I can disable highways, B-roads, toll, ferries and on my roadbikes I will disable gravel sections. It will tell me how many kilometers till the next gas-stations along the trip and warn me about speed traps. Not that I speed on purpose, but sometimes you are a couple of kms above the limit.

Especially on sections where I have to change direction every 300 to 500 meters I don't want to deal with reading a map. Voice navigation in my headset and an occasional quick glance at the screen is much safer than fiddling with a paper map.

Can you share what app/device you use that has all of those features like specifically picking out fun roads? I'm not aware of that feature on any major nav app.

I’ve found google maps offline mode + the avoid highways feature can have good results. It also tends to have shitty results in highly interconnected areas, but it works alright for the country.

Sounds like he's probably using a TomTom Rider - there's an option specifically to pick a scenic/fun ride between A and B.

You can try Kurviger -- it uses OpenStreetMap data and chooses "fun" curving routes using the Graphhopper routing engine.

https://kurviger.de/en

I use https://trips.furkot.com

Scenic (http://motomappers.com) is pretty good at finding out-of-the-way routes.

Garmin has that functionality on their moto-specific GPS units. I've used it on my BMW-branded Garmin a few times. It isn't going to find the equivalent to Deals Gap in North Dakota, but it does the best it can with what it's got to work with, i. e., if there's something with some curves, it will reliably favor that over a straight road.

I too ride motorcycles in Europe; I bought a special GPS device for motorbikes but it's not very good -- it's a Tom Tom, did you go with Garmin?

I have a Tom Tom Rider. I primarily use the "thrilling ride" option for A to B navigation, using the most aggressive setting for corners and elevation. My day starts out with picking a random place and the Tom Tom picks a scenic route for me. After doing this a couple of times I book a hotel and drive there. Repeat the next day.

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