Ok Google – it's time you discovered cyclists
cyklistbloggen.se
cyklistbloggen.se
Even in the Netherlands, it's often better than Google Maps. And it can serve as the basis for apps building on top of it like https://cycle.travel/.
Nobody needs a single entity corporation to do everything for them, it's really time people see that there is shopping experience besides Amazon and search/map experiences besides Google.
Google maps is the default option for most people. Why would we want to make it harder for people to start cycling by forcing them to hunt down some specialist app that they don't even know exists? Why not just have the information in the app they're already using?
* in the general sense, not just today’s sense, like roads, bridges, power, water etc.
I have no reference to hand agreeing with me, but somehow I suspect that Google Maps is not the biggest barrier between Joe Commuter and the bicycle.
The thing I would much prefer is clear signage. The lack of it is common.
That said, I think Portland has done a great job with the signage part of this problem. Signs like [1] are present at just about every intersection of bike routes, giving directions to neighborhoods and landmarks. And when a bike route dog-legs, directional "sharrow" symbols [2] are clearly visible on the road surface.
[1]: https://nacto.org/case-study/bikeway-network-signage-in-port...
[2]: https://nacto.org/publication/urban-bikeway-design-guide/bic...
It uses OpenStreetMap data plus a heavily customised instance of OSRM (Open Source Routing Machine, a fast routeplanning engine). The routing "profile", which calculates the weighting, is a few thousand lines of code alone, never mind various other stuff like custom elevation calculations.
It's a great project to work on, and the best reward of all is when people plan multi-day tours with it and say how much they've enjoyed the route.
Edit: This looks pretty great, but I should probably point out that it turned my 5.5 mile commute into a 8.5 mile one. Realize it's probably trying to avoid larger streets; Hope this is or becomes configurable.
Edit: Thanks everyone for the feedback! Just pushed a quick fix:
- USA now defaults to miles & feet
- Canada and Mexico now default to km & metres
- Britain defaults to miles & metres (as before, yes we're weird)
- mainland Europe, Australia and NZ default to km & metres (as before)
The USA should be feet and miles.
Canada should be metres and kilometres.
But you did say North America, it seems these might use miles per hour for road speeds, so they might not want metres and kilometres. I don't know if they want feet, yards or metres though.
Antigua, Bahamas, Barbuda, British Virgin Islands, Grenada, Puerto Rico, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, or the US Virgin Islands.
It'd be better to prefer roads that are further from busy roads. I understand that's very hand-wavey and probably super tricky to implement.
I've got a page of notes on possible ways of fixing this - it is a hard problem. One possibility I'm toying with is a massive grid of "scenic value" for (say) each 0.01° x 0.01° square, so I could downrate the surroundings of motorways and uprate routes through (say) national parks.
The set of people who would happily upload cycling data minus their precise start/endpoint is probably 1000x larger than the set of people who enjoy map curation in their free time, but I’m not sure what solution I can present to bicyclist friends that would let them contribute.
The Strava heatmap is also licensed for usage in OSM, and in a lot of areas it has pretty good coverage of bike paths already (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Strava).
[1] https://osmcha.org/?filters={"source"%3A[{"label"%3A"strava"...}
I know I can find out by trying different apps but I appreciate you potentially saving me time. Thanks!
The OSM directions for biking to my office involve going through a decommissioned oil field (fenced off, so the road isn't actually passable) and a swamp. What's weird is that it looks like OSM knows the road is closed but still tries to route me through it. Google's directions for the same destination aren't perfect either but at least they'd get me to my destination (they include a short jaunt down an eroding hillside where I have to walk my bike because the sand is so loose).
That cycle.travel site looks really promising. They give the same route as Google Maps, but do a much better job explaining that part of it is an unpaved dirt trail.
The routing errors you describe could be issues with the particular route planner you used, or they could be issues with the OSM data itself.
Some parts of the world are indeed better mapped than others (this is also true of Google Maps), but the great thing about OSM is if you find an error you can fix it yourself in seconds.
Just click that “edit” button right there in the OSM interface...
Is that actually true if you are on a bike? In my city OSM is a good source of unofficial bikeways. What does the cycle layer have to say?
If you click on the mouse cursor button on the right and then click on the symbol, it will show you the details for that object.
The cycling directions in my town, for example, are great in the sense that they take you on only bike paths with little cars. However, they are often 25% longer than just taking the roads which also have bike lanes. I am comfortable biking on the roads so I prefer the roads, but others might not be. Which set of directions do you present? I guess you could have options for both like "most scenic" and "most direct". However, there will always be people complaining about routes being too roundabout or not safe enough because of preference differences.
I think with cycling sometimes its best to just use the bike directions as a starting off point and then explore from there. Hopefully you can be in a place for long enough to discover the routes that fit you best and stick to them. For me, thats actually a fun part of the activity.
Those choices are insanely expensive for Google to provide.
Every unique configuration of options has to be hosted by hundreds of servers in each region. The cost of running the routing service is proportional to 2 ^ (the number of options). It's because everything has to be precomputed for fast lookups, and the lookup tables for one set of options aren't valid for another. See [1].
This is why Google hasn't added any more options in ~a decade. Even then, some combinations of options use various approximations and in some cases don't return the mathematically best result, or take longer to do so.
[1]: https://bib.irb.hr/datoteka/644571.MaueSandersMatijevic.pdf
That's a weak hill to die on with the money G makes. That's just the cost of doing business. People using maps need choices. If you as a map app choose not to provide an option, that's just an area a competitor can one up you. Once they do, you have to play catch up. That could be advantageous as you see what the competitor did that does/does not work allowing you to shortcut some of the R&D.
It's not "doing business" if people using maps don't provide enough revenue back to the company either directly or through advertising. The reason Google makes so much money is that they are careful to implement features that are revenue positive.
I don’t see how that can be true. With, conservatively, 50 million destinations, that would mean 25E14 different precomputed routes (edit, that’s exactly what the paper you reference argues: An extreme way to accelerate queries is to precompute all shortest path distances d(s, t). However, this is impractical for large graphs since it requires quadratic space and preprocessing time.)
Also, the average GPS without any internet connectivity can compute routes. Surely, those don’t store those precomputed routes.
What likely is true is that it may be a bit harder to do a bicycle route planner. Slightly simplifying, a planner for cars, given two places A and B relatively far apart, ‘just’ needs to find the best route from A to any on-ramp to a highway, from any highway to B, and a route only on highways between the on- and off-ramps.
On the other hand, bike routes that have to be planned typically will be a bit shorter.
Together, that means it isn’t that hard to compute routes on the fly. https://routeplanner.fietsersbond.nl/ does exactly that, giving you options such as “shortest route”, “fewest interruptions”, “racing”, “fewer cars”, or “recreational”.
It's similar to the way that we intuitively navigate by car - if you drive from (say) London to Glasgow, you don't bother weighing up the many options: rather, you take whatever local roads get you to the M1 fastest, then follow M1, M6, M74, and then whatever local roads get you to your exact destination.
Generally bicyclists have a fixed starting point so you could cache the results and improve them over time. (Obviously cross-country would require further work to support efficiently.)
I’m all for “anything can be done in the cloud” but if the cloud can’t efficiently handle this, I still have a couple of supercomputers laying around that I’d be happy to let puzzle over my bicycling needs for a few minutes (or overnight, or for a few weeks when charging) if that helped me find a more scenic route someday that isn’t much slower than the direct one.
Google Maps' offline maps also include routing information. The downloads are pretty small, which definitely excludes the more space-intensive algorithms.
No. A small area means a small download.
I would argue that updating the routing algorithm's data structure isn't the expensive part of reacting to live traffic. Getting and processing the raw data sounds a lot harder than re-running the customization phase of routing preprocessing.
So I don't think it is that expensive or insummortably difficult.
https://services.google.com/fb/forms/streetviewussuggestions...
Imagine a slider between “Prefer protected bikeways” and “Prefer fastest routes”. You could show in UI the trip time for each extreme and a ‘middle’ choice.
Paired with a slider that says “Avoid uphill climbs” to “Prefer uphill climbs” and some checkboxes for scenic routes and paved-or-not and “fragile goods”/trailer-towing/etc, you’d have something pretty amazing.
How much car exhaust do I want to sniff? How much do I want to have to fight for space on a 'cycle lane' that's just a bunch of road markings directing me right down the middle of a lane of cars? What's the shade situation like? How well-maintained is the road? How sketchy are the neighborhoods I'm going through? Am I in a hurry, and how much do I wanna trade these other desires off for The Shortest Possible Route? Am I taking my time and feel like exploring?
At least I currently live in a very flat place so I don't need to worry about any hills to either detour around or sssssllllooooowwwwlllllyyyyy grind my way up.
Then you could look up map directions and maybe choose different routes based on the time estimate plus a breakdown of what percentage of the trip will be in different conditions, and you can choose your preferred route based on your safety tolerance.
As somewhat of an aside, I find the way you've explained your trade-offs here strange - as a matter of tolerance, and comfort being around cars vs desire for scenery. I've seen a lot of stories of very experienced, comfortable cyclists killed by cars every year. IMO this is very much not a learning curve or experience issue, it's an issue that biking on busy roads designed for cars and not bikes is genuinely dangerous in a way that is largely out of your control as a cyclist.
When I cycle on roads I am hyper aware of my surroundings. I am scanning all around me, including behind me every few seconds. I’m also specifically looking at people’s faces and assume they don’t see me until we make eye contact. I also take space aggressively - if there is no bike lane I will bike in the middle of the car lane until I see a safe place for the car behind me to pass, and only then move over. This might piss off the cars behind me, but as long as they see me, its OK with me.
All these techniques make sure that I am seen by other cars and nothing surprising happens. This kind of riding takes years to build up experience. Anectodal, but through my 25 years of heavy commuting on a bicycle on roads shared with cars I’ve never had an accident - but I’ve certainly had several while driving a car. Ive also had several close calls on bike trails because those tend to be filled with pedestrians who aren't looking at all and don't follow any rules.
For sure I could go out biking tomorrow and get killed but freak accidents happen in all areas of life. Personally I don’t feel in danger on the roads - but everyone’s tolerance and experience is different and that’s one of the cruxes of giving good bike directions.
My city is super progressive and bike friendly, but even then it's effectively suicide to try and use certain bike lanes and everyone just has this communal knowledge.
a) capture routes of bike trips taken while using nav apps b) send camera-laden cars around, the same way these maps were originally built, and this time, measure bike trips c) ask bicyclists
If everyone really has this communal knowledge, as you say, then it can be gathered.
Still fails to capture individual preferences which are often complete opposites, sometimes even for the same person on different occasions.
When I'm riding fast I greatly prefer proximity to cars over proximity to pedestrians or slow cyclists, it's much safer because even the worst drivers are more predictable than average pedestrians, and the speed difference between fast cycling and urban driving is quite small anyways. In terms of injuries it doesn't matter much who takes you down. When I'm riding slow those preferences (and the safety considerations they are based on) are completely inverted.
Far more people have died from the right hook, it's biking's "most feared crash." You have to constantly watch out for oblivious drivers.
What really pisses me off about this is that the only time people discuss the safety of cyclists is in the wake of a fatal crash. If you dare to suggest that cyclists often have choices that can prevent the crash, you get called out for victim blaming.
It's bullshit to shut down discussion of things people can do to protect themselves because of some misguided respect for the dead. For goodness' sake talk about it so people on the streets are armed with the knowledge that will save their lives so we aren't having the same discussion again and again and again.
It doesn't matter what the law says, it doesn't matter who had the right to occupy that bit of the road, it matters that cyclists keep dying because they're the more vulnerable road user.
It's naive to think that we're going to train every driver to do the safe thing. It's far more realistic to educate the people with the most to lose (i.e. the cyclists) to do the safe thing regardless of whether the drivers around them are aware of them or not.
I'm not so sure. I think there are definitely things to do that can make you avoid the vast majority of these incidents (don't bike to the right of a car when an intersection is coming up if you can avoid, obviously look at the car's turn signals before passing them on the right, pass on the left when you think someone will turn right, etc.), but there are plenty of instances where it is not avoidable and even experienced cyclists can get right-hooked (like biking on a bike lane on a heavily trafficked road with many side streets to turn off of).
> It's naive to think that we're going to train every driver to do the safe thing.
I think it's not an either-or. I don't think that we have to throw in the towel on every effort to change behavior - people have been convinced to stop littering to a massive extent, checking your right mirror seems minor in comparison.
With the caveat that my experience is not your experience, I respectfully submit that the bike lane is poorly designed in this case and that it shouldn't be used to travel straight through the intersection in this case. I signal a lane-change to the left before the intersection and go straight through in the regular traffic lane, moving right ASAP after the intersection to not obstruct traffic.
My riding is mostly dense urban where traffic is moving slowly enough to do this if I put some hustle into it.
> I think it's not an either-or. I don't think that we have to throw in the towel on every effort to change behavior.
I am absolutely in agreement that it's not either-or, but if cyclists are doing something that's (almost) always safe, they're a lot less likely to be killed by the untrained drivers, of which there will be many for the foreseeable future.
What I do doesn't work for cyclists puttering along at 10mph (or grinding up a hill); the speed difference is too great to safely merge left. Training the drivers greatly increases the safety level for such cyclists on roads with cycle lanes between the regular lanes and the curb.
That said, I think that we can't just place the onus on bikers to both ignore the drawn on bike lane lines and also to bike considerably faster than they are comfortable without trying to also change driver behavior. I think this mostly agrees with your last point.
(I've ridden about 800 miles by bicycle so far this year, and >4000 total since I started using a GPS. No right hooks or right-hook close calls.)
In a busy intersection where one also has to attend to pedestrians, other cars, etc., moving in different directions, trying to track what's going on behind you can be almost impossible (and thus quite dangerous for all).
My "solution" to this problem is to carefully but fully occupy the bike lane before making such a turn. Yeah, it's illegal, and draws lots of swearing (and worse) from bicyclists. But there's just no other good way to keep everyone safe.
EDIT: Okay, it's a surface-grade light rail train. In the cases I'm familiar with, there's always a red light forbidding crossing through the path of such a train. So, you're not yielding to the train, you're obeying a signal that's in front of you.
As a cyclist (about 15,000 total miles, half touring, half commuting split between Boston and Cleveland), my solution to the problem is to not design the infrastructure in ways that sets cyclists up for the crash.
It is absolutely woefully bad design that cycle lanes on the right continue all the way to the intersection. A solution that works for experienced cyclists to to end the bike lane some distance before the intersection. This forces a merge in a zone where there's no risk of a right hook. I float this with the full understanding that it only works for cyclists who are capable of making the merge at around 20mph/30kmph. And/or where the topography is favorable.
No, you don't have to be able to sustain that speed, but being able to do it in short bursts greatly expands your choices when riding in urban traffic.
My experience has been that nobody minds much at that speed, especially if you merge back into the "bike lane" while you're still in the intersection but after you're past the lanes people would be turning right into. Turning traffic has to slow anyway to make the turn, after all.
This is a specific case of a general rule I try to apply when riding: Make people choose to hit you; don't let them do it accidentally.
I would add that this is really only a valid strategy in urban traffic where even the major arterials only flow under 30mph because the density of turns and stop lights prevents higher speeds. Major arteries in the suburbs or around malls are a nightmare for riding because traffic generally flows a lot faster. Some of the most hair-raising riding I've done was near a mall while bike touring. It was basically unavoidable, and also absolutely miserable.
Unless the road has sufficient room for a bike lane of a minimum width of 5 feet, then you end up with a lot of close passes from cars in the right lane and also end up riding in the door zone of parked cars to your right.
In those cases, it makes more sense to just ride in the center of the right-most lane available for traffic and get more room from cars passing you. This would work for streets that have multiple lanes for same direction traffic.
> Major arteries in the suburbs or around malls are a nightmare for riding because traffic generally flows a lot faster. Some of the most hair-raising riding I've done was near a mall while bike touring. It was basically unavoidable, and also absolutely miserable.
It really depends on how much traffic is present. I've ridden on roads in the center of the right lane with speed limits ranging from 35 to 45 mph without much of an issue. Drivers almost always change lanes to pass me or slow down behind me before passing.
Thank you for clarifying. Yes, cyclists riding in a regular traffic lane should absolutely take the center of the lane for all of the reasons you've listed. Again, make people choose to hit you; don't let them do it by accident.
In California, that's not illegal, it's the law. It's on the driver's test. Kind of counterintuitive at first, but seems much safer and also more consistent with the way turns are handled with any normal lane.
This is true. The closest thing thing to this is checking for pedestrians, but even the fastest pedestrians aren't moving more than 7 to 8 mph and will almost always check for vehicles prior to entering an intersection. A cyclist could be moving anywhere from 10 to 20 mph and could be quite far from the intersection and still end up in a crash with a turning vehicle.
> My "solution" to this problem is to carefully but fully occupy the bike lane before making such a turn. Yeah, it's illegal
In most states in the US, it's not illegal. The law states that right turns must be made as close as practicable to the right hand edge or curb.
Which state/country are you in? This is actually required in California, and I'm always annoyed at the majority of drivers who simply DO NOT come and occupy the bike lane intentionally, making it confusing for me (as a bicyclist) whether they are going to wait for me or not. (coupled with how a lot of drivers just don't use turn signals accurately).
Funnily enough, that's exactly what you're supposed to do and is required by law in every state i've lived in.
Boston (and the surrounding communities) are doing an increasingly large amount of the former. I no longer live there and never used them much, but I'd be keen to hear about the hazards of that design.
Unprotected bike lanes on these roads exist but over the past decade I've personally watched two people die on bikes from right turns and heard of dozens of collisions.
As a lifelong city biker, I am curious what exactly you are talking about. Certainly, there are some roads where you're more likely to be hooked by someone turning on right (Market St in SF comes to mind), but not a "no go zone"?
The first time I rode my bike down there I terrified. You don't have much time to react, the hill creates a blind spot at the point where you have to cross traffic and because the road is used by people trying to beat traffic during rush hour, drivers speed constantly and don't really pay attention. Just on foot i've almost been hit by cars a few times at the top of the hill. Definitely not my favourite route.
This is just not even remotely true.
I cycle all the time in Manhattan and Brooklyn and for the same destination, the car and cycling routes are drastically different.
Cycling routes give tremendous preference for roads with actual cycling lanes, and do their best to avoid main arteries to give you a safer side street instead.
You can verify this yourself in Google Maps by turning on the "Bicycling" layer to see the green-marked bicycle routes, picking random intersections to get directions between, and observe how it tries to route you along bike lanes. (Of course, Manhattan streets are tricky, so it's not the case 100% of the time because giving too much preference to bike lines can result in a much longer trip.)
Quick searching also reveals that Google absolutely uses the elevation data to try to route riders along flat roads, that uphill shows a longer estimated time, and you can even see an elevation map of the route.
So as far as I can tell, this article is just 100% factually wrong, based on an entirely false premise.
Is Google Maps perfect for cyclists? Of course not (e.g. it has no idea cobblestone streets are something to avoid), but it's not perfect for cars either (thinks I ought to drive down a pedestrian staircase in LA).
But there's clear evidence that Google Maps "discovered" cyclists sometime around 2014, if not before. It's been a while. (My biggest wish is for it to integrate bike sharing into directions.)
Portugal doesn't have any cycling info. The routes in Spain and France tend to go down things that are marginally identifiable as roads or cycling paths, and more likely to be hiking paths. Definitely the sort of thing that I'd not take a road bike down, but a MTB would be ok.
I know there are huge variances in the quality of government-provided data, as well as whether governments provide them at all.
And that while Google Maps has Street View as a ground truth in some parts of the world, it doesn't everywhere, and especially often where there are bike paths that aren't next to a road for cars.
So without knowing more in any particular circumstance, the government may be just as likely to blame as Google.
This is why I always use Citymapper to find the nearest Citibike racks to my start and end points, then switch over to Google Maps to generate my route. It does a better job than Citymapper at actual bike directions, IMO.
Microsoft long ago (10 years?) added a great feature for bus routes on Bing Maps: "Previous stop is ___" / "If you reach ___, you've gone too far". That's a brilliant idea, and it tells me that the people at Microsoft who built this actually take the bus themselves.
It's pretty clear to me that everyone at Google drives.
I then still have to import it in Komoot before using it, to filter out unwanted surfaces or way types.
I tried it for a few rides already and the route selection was great.
(Edit: to be fair I just did a count -- it was 1 tap + long hold + 4 regular taps, though each is on a different part of the screen so you can't just button mash your way through. So I exaggerated a bit, it's more like 5.5 taps instead of 7.)
It seems to just aim at the shortest route, doesn't matter if there are 10% climbs in it.
For anyone getting into touring, Komoot is much better for cyclists.
It is very possible it was legal, so you wouldn't have been arrested.
For example, I ended up on that road: https://www.google.fr/maps/@45.8894892,-0.9627792,3a,75y,325...
110 km/h speed limit, and yet not a single "motor vehicles only" sign (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panneau_d'indication_d'une_rou...) on any of the entrances. Not even a "forbidden to cyclists" sign (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panneau_d'interdiction_d'acc%C...). Yep, that's crazy.
I actually didn't get "on" the road, I stopped before the insertion lane was over, and cautiously walked back 200 or 300 m to the entry point (because of course this part was one-way, and the last thing drivers expect is meeting a cyclist there, in a forbidden direction, especially right when they prepare to speed up to insert into highway traffic). I looked for the warning/interdiction sign I had probably missed: there was no sign. And you check any entrance on Streetview if you have time to lose, you won't find any.
Worst thing? I had to take that road anyway a bit later (farther), because it is the only bridge around, and I was late. I had already taken that horrendous bridge in the morning and I had sworn I would never take it again, but I had no choice.
https://www.google.fr/maps/@45.9202881,-0.9689672,3a,75y,140...
See how narrow both the bike lane and the car lane are? And when I was there it wasn't practically a car lane but a lorry lane. Speed limit is 70 km/h but all of them overspeed. And anyway, the bridge is damn high, so you are (well, I was) stuck at 15 km/h in your little painted lane with a wall lorries passing 50 cm away 50 or 60 km/h faster. Of course, over this kind of bridge, you may add some wind, possibly sideways, to fully enjoy your cohabitation. And then you go down, still in your 70 cm wide lane, as it is as steep as when you climbed, you reach 50 km/h, perhaps 60 km/h, and all of sudden, first you meet a large hole in the road where the bridge deck articulates with the ground part, and right after you jump over the hole, the bike lane turns right and the only possible way to turn is to come to basically a full stop. Then you stop for a while to calm down.
I think that's my worse cycling memory.
See e.g. English: https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=en&t...
Or
https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=en&t...
(I guess these examples are only salient for Dutch speakers, but I'm 100% sure that similar cases exist for all other languages, where people don't want to switch the language of their whole OS just to hear streetnames spoken in a non-....stupid way)
For locals, having English pronunciation sounds absolutely ridiculous.
But for tourists, local pronunciation can be utterly unrecognizable. ("Rio Tinto" becomes "Hee-oo Cheen-too".) The mangled English pronuniciation, at least, is mangled to what a tourist can recognize/expect.
But I absolutely agree that a toggle would be a super-nice feature. As well as phonetic hints when a road has a different pronunication from what you might guess (especially in English).
So yeah, tourists should not be forced to hear Dutch streetnames in Dutch, just as I shouldnt have to change the language settings of my whole phone to hear them in Dutch.
Several apps using OSM seem to handle the toggling just fine (e.g. Maps.Me), and apparently the cycling experience is superior on OSM anyway. I used it solely for the offline maps, but maybe I might start using it as my main maps provider.
They have since 2016, at least on iOS. [1] I thought it would be a godsend... but I ended up turning it off, because if I type 98% in language A and 2% in language B, it changed words in language A to language B far more often than made up for getting words in language B right.
[1] https://www.cultofmac.com/441836/how-to-set-up-multilingual-...
And I say this as an avid cyclist.
I prefer to use Garmin Connect most of the time because it does differentiate between road bike versus mountain bike courses, and can do popularity based routing for either type. But sometimes the routing algorithm goes crazy and gives you routes that make no sense at all.
Strava data is available for license without acquiring the whole company.
I'm not affiliated. Just a happy user.
I have several paper cycling maps that I maintain (sometimes they need to be updated) because one of my dearest hobbies is bycyclecamping.
I've let that computer betray me several times, no more.
I've used both Google maps and OSMAnd. One summer I tried using osmand offline feature to download my entire route.
I still prefer paper maps, a compass and dead reckoning.
Nothing against paper maps, just curious if there's a reason why that wouldn't be best of both worlds.
I've thought about exploring an alternate set of tags to tag something in OSM as a "popular" cycle path, but I'm not sure how to go about proposing that tagging system.
From my point of view the best feature is that Google shows elevation gain, which is a huge deal for a bike. I've checked this multiple times and it seems quite accurate.
The worst feature is that some routes simply aren't shown. Google will not show a bike route from Grants Pass Oregon to the coast going directly over the Coast Range. The best route is over Bear Camp Road but Google no longer shows it. People have died on that road--most famously in in 2006 but there have been others. [1] The route it does show is suicide for a bike. (Try Grants Pass to Gold Beach to see this.)
Before that it was awful. No I don't want to play 7 bridges of Königsberg, I want to slip through the park and up the one way street.
This quote is followed immediately by a screen capture showing the text 'Mostly flat' underneath the journey time and distance.
In fact in Edinburgh, UK my experience with Google Maps has been that it automatically selects routes that use more cycle paths, roads with cycle lanes, and flatter or downhill options. Maybe this is different per city?
I notified them of the issue a couple of years ago and it got fixed a few months later, but it came back again. At that point I gave up as I don't really use the service for cycling anyway. I know my city well enough and when I cycle outside of it, I use Strava.
And something changes every year. Sure, someone who does nothing but ride, day in, day out, like a bike equivalent of an old school taxi driver, would learn them all after some time. I don't have that amount of time to spend.
I don't see traffic jams formed by bikes, no, but I regularly see construction crews regularly closing bike lanes and bike paths for work, for parking their construction equipment, or for setting up temporary signage.
We use an open source routing engine called graphhopper. It's really good, the team behind it is great, and I strongly recommended it out of all the major routing systems. We tried them all, graphhopper is the most extensible, fastest, and best managed project. Graphhopper takes OSM data and computes a routeable graph based off one or more routing profiles you specify. There are default profiles, but we have spent a considerable amount of time making our own custom routing and weighting profiles to give the best directions for cyclists, and are in the process of extending it further so that it takes into account our database of about 50mm recorded bike rides by our users. The result is that our cycling directions are pretty dang good at this point. We hope to deploy the new popularity based routing stuff in the coming weeks.
We have both a web and mobile route planner that are worth checking out. The mobile route planner is a paid feature, but allows free demos without saving. The web route planner is free, though some of the more advanced bits (multi-route editing, advanced libraries of routes, etc) are paid.
Finally, another mention in this thread of a quadlock - they are awesome. I take my quadlock mountain biking and it has never budged. I'm not talking gentle mountain biking, but big jumps and drops and high speeds. They are super durable, the case is solid and is extremely protective of your phone. They are worth the premium!
I have yet to find a better one than Mapy.cz. Great app, offline regional maps and (subjectively) beautiful map aesthetics.
The sound quality is not great for music, but they are perfect for voice. The big selling point is that they don't cover your ears, so it doesn't affect your ability to hear your surroundings.