An ingenious vintage German cycle map (2014)
blog.systemed.net
blog.systemed.net
In this example, the elevation trace reveals a very steep section on Gregory Canyon Rd, between Baseline Rd and Flagstaff Rd:
There are much better alternatives, such as komoot or Strava or GPSies (I'm not affiliated.)
As important as (and sometimes more important than) the profile in a section is the gradient. The Google map doesn't tell me if there's going to be a 10% or 20% piece, and I can't glean it from the curve, because depending on the length of the track, the relations change.
Additionally, it's very important to know what kind of road you're on, and what kind of surface that road has. The thing only Google could do here, and doesn't, is to tell me how busy (with cars) the roads are and offer me a way around busy roads. Komoot at least shows me the type of road or street and its surface.
See this: https://imgur.com/a/j20XOmi (from komoot.)
the hill in the middle looks scary, but the line along its ridge tells me the gradient isn't steep. Yellow is 8% (it tells you on hover). It tells me what percentage (and where) the road is a bike road, or larger road, etc.
Strava on the other hand has heat maps: https://www.strava.com/heatmap which tell you where local cyclists like to go. One caveat is that it shows you where local road cyclists and mountain bikers like to go. Those folks can have vastly different understanding of what viable road conditions are from each other, and from you.
Unfortunately, planning cycling tracks is still a chore, and getting it wrong can be dangerous or at least unpleasant. The market is there, but it's nowhere near as huge as for cars.
Fully agree with your comments. It's not just Google that can tell you about busy roads, though - in some countries that's available as open data.
I run https://cycle.travel/map , which uses open traffic data (in the US, UK and a couple of other places) to influence its OpenStreetMap-based bike routing. So, for example, in the Home Counties (broadly the London commuter belt) the A-class roads are generally busy and unrideable, whereas A-class roads in the Scottish Highlands are often (not always) beautifully quiet. cycle.travel will happily route along the latter but not the former.
The Strava approach is interesting, but Strava users are biased towards athletic cyclists who generally have a higher tolerance for busy roads. For tourers and other leisure riders I'm less convinced that the presence of other cyclists is a good signifier of pleasant cycling. (In London, for example, Strava shows the Euston Road as a busy cycling thoroughfare, which I'd never dream of riding.)
Yeah, Strava tends to overestimate the rideability of bigger roads. Keep in mind that a lot of groups use Strava, and it's easier to ride a busy road when you're in a group. In Germany, for example, you even have a different legal status on the road. I would love it if I could somehow filter the global Strava data, but they don't make their data available; not that I would expect them to.
I do avoid the underpass, though, that's terrifying!
It's also very possible that they're using the public domain dataset from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM)[1] in 2000 -- probably with some cleaning to eliminate large spikes due to trees and buildings.
http://www.rufusguides.com/sanfran.html
and SFBC has a (large!) vector PDF version on their site
https://www.sfbike.org/download/map.pdf
This map uses shading to indicate how steep the gradient of each individual city block is, but interestingly the shading doesn't show the direction of that gradient, so you don't immediately know whether it will be uphill or downhill. But the map also includes contour lines, so if you look closely, you can figure it out from the contours even if you're unfamiliar with the neighborhood.
On the other hand, if you're generally familiar with the neighborhood, the shading might be helpful by itself because you might have an intuition about when you're going to be going uphill and when you're going to be going downhill.
I agree that replicating the cool visualization method from the linked article might be tricky in San Francisco for the exact reasons you mention.
Steps to reproduce:
1. Calculate a route
2. Click the blue navigation icon at the bottom (it should show the from, to, car/cycling/walking, distance, settings button, etc.)
3. Press on the distance or time.
Optionally, see the "Analyse on map" button.