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Comment by Vinnl | Hacker News Reader

It's time cyclists discovered OpenStreetMaps. The cyclist community, as far as I can see (it's just a mode of transportation for me, so I'm not part of it), has been doing an excellent job of making sure cycling routes are properly mapped there. Doesn't solve the Street View problem, but you're really missing out if you haven't tried it for navigation.

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/.

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cycle.travel's my project - thanks for the mention! Always happy to hear suggestions and ideas.

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.

cycle.travel does not work on iOS. Loaded page, green popup, Starting from: cycling to: I filled these out and pressed Find Route, nothing happens. Tried selecting Circular route, press Find Route, nothing happens

Curious - works for me but would like to debug! Could you ping me the start/end points you're entering? (info@cycle.travel if you don't want to post them here.)

same thing happened to me on the home page (linux, firefox 66), but the actual map pages works great.

Works for me on iOS 13.4. Even have 1Blocker installed; didn't have to disable.

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.

Glad you like it! It does optimise for low (motor) traffic routes. But you'll see that there's a little "Any road/Paved only" toggle - currently the latter just filters out unpaved roads/paths, but my medium-term ambition is for it to be a bit more blasé on city streets too.

It generates a ~10km route in my Canadian city that starts off in meters, and switches to miles. I know we're somewhat used to flipping between metric and imperial, but it's not a common thing to do mid-trip.

So I’m genuinely interested - what would you expect? I was born in Britain in the mid-70s and miles and metres, though an unconventional combination, is what I grew up with. But I realise not everywhere has the same weird combination of metric and imperial as we do. What would make sense to you from a North American viewpoint?

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)

As an American, the mix of meters and miles really threw me off. When it said "40m" and "5mi" I thought it was switching between estimated travel time and distance. For me, it would be better if it was consistent with the measurement system (using miles and feet, OR meters and km).

In Canada distances are almost always in meters/kilometers. For US I assume they would want feet/miles.

Not the OP, but probably picking one unit at the start and sticking with it.

So "6 miles" and "0.04 miles"? I don't think that's the most understandable for anyone.

Probably feet for the latter. How is it sane or understandable for anyone to switch from metric to imperial mid-route?

I immediately recognized metres + miles (for a road distance) as British, I was also born there.

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.

I'm from the US, and I would never expect "feet" in a road sign or on a bike. For distances below a mile I'd expect "½ mile" or "¼ mile"—this is how they are almost universally marked on road signs across the country. For extremely short road distances I've occasionally seen "⅛ mile". For road distances any shorter than that, which in my head I'm thinking of as "very short long distances", at that point I might expect—and I feel a little guilty even typing this out loud—yards. (Or blocks, where 1 block = ⅛ mile, but that's a peculiarly Chicago measurement, I think.)

Feet do show up on signs, but always in large round multiples of 100 feet. They tend to only show up on low-speed roads though -- signs like 'blind driveway 500ft'. On highways, distance signage is almost exclusively in miles and fractions thereof.

U.S. Miles and Yards... Canada, Mexico KM and Meters.

In canada we use feet and inches for building dimensions, but not for distance travelled. so we've still got the weird metric/english combo, but not quite as weird as miles and metres.

Well, miles andc metres is basicallyh identical to miles and yards, so it's not that weird...

Thanks for cycle.travel :) I probably found out about it in a different comment section as well.

This is great - bookmarked! I see that while it does try to avoid busy roads, it often takes the road that's right next to the motorway (even when not strictly necessary - probably because it's shorter and has little traffic).

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.

It would! As you say, roads (or cycleways) beside motorways are usually short, have little traffic, gentle gradients and often a prized position in a valley rather than lumbering up a hillside. Ideal cycle routes... apart from the motorway a few metres (/feet) away.

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.

Calculating "scenic value" sounds like a very good idea indeed! Plus points for points of interest and greenery, minus points for busy roads. Again, I understand it's not easy to implement :)

Bookmarked! While it seemed unable to locate my home address for some reason, when I manually dragged the pin it planned a route from my work to my home nearly identical to the one it took me several weeks of harrowing journeys with Google Maps and looking at PDFs of bike routes to find. This will DEFINITELY come in handy in the future!

It looks like OSM has two builtin bike routing algorithms you can use, and at least for a few routes I tried they both seem significantly worse than what Google Maps does (Big fat disclaimer: I work at Google, although not on anything related to this).

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.

OSM itself is really just the base map. A huge, editable database of map data. Anyone can build apps that make use of that data - the route planner you used is just one of many.

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...

>...fenced off, so the road isn't actually passable...

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?

I'd have to toss my bike over a barbed wire fence, or maybe cut the lock. The service road winds between a bunch of natural gas storage tanks so I don't think they'd willingly let me in. There's a "≠" symbol where the service road is fenced off, which I assume means impassible but "≠" isn't on the map legend so I'm not sure. When I hit the cycle layer, the ≠ symbol goes away

≠ represents a gate [1], which the routing engine probably assumes you can go through; if it's not possible to open the gate, it should have an access=private tag added to it to indicate that it's not passable.

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.

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:barrier%3Dgate

Yeah, when I was referring to OSM I meant that map data they collect, which has excellent bicycle data. That can then be used by specialised projects for cycling-specific interfaces.

I have to agree, this instance that "Google" has to do better is silly. There are alternatives that are dedicated to cycling and mapping of cycling routes. Why not use one of them?

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.

Why shouldn't Google do it? We should want as many people as possible to cycle. It's healthier, reduces traffic, no pollution.

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?

Because as “technology”* becomes infrastructure it’s better off that it transition (via growth) into public hands. And OSM (and Wikipedia and..) demonstrate that “public hands” doesn’t automatically mean “government ownership” especially with transnational resources.

* in the general sense, not just today’s sense, like roads, bridges, power, water etc.

Google can do whatever they want. The point is that there's a great resource already there.

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.

As a cyclist, is there an app I can install that simply has “start recording” and “stop recording” and lets me trim my off the start and end, so that I can contribute my cycling path data to OSM without having to curate it further?

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.

Just having a trace of your route probably isn't very useful in a lot of cases, since it's going to be mostly on roads that are already mapped. Instead, you'd probably want to map the actual paths, in which case you can view your GPS trace in the editor to map from without having to share it publicly.

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).

How many bike paths have been added to OSM as a result of the Strava heatmap identifying them?

I don't think there's any exact numbers. You can search for changesets that have Strava listed as a source [1], but that doesn't mean the Strava data was actually used.

[1] https://osmcha.org/?filters={"source"%3A[{"label"%3A"strava"...}

Thanks! Note that the link doesn't seem to work at all for me :( But I'm happy to see that someone is drawing the connections from the data somehow.

There should be an extra } at the end of the link; HN seems to be interpreting it as a separate character for some reason.

I've got OSMTracker which I think might be what you're looking for.

A lot of cycling routes are obscure and labyrinthine, meaning you have to constantly check your phone to ensure you aren't lost. While riding, and in direct daylight I have to stop to be able to read the map. It ends up taking a lot of time. I wish cities were more clear about signage. I experienced obscure and labyrinthine bike routes in my own city, and I usually bring a bike with me when travelling to other cities and have experienced the same thing pretty much everywhere.

The thing I would much prefer is clear signage. The lack of it is common.

My favorite biking accessory is my Quadlock - https://www.quadlockcase.com/. Having my phone securely mounted on my handlebars is a game changer. If I want maps, I have those up. On longer rides, I have my phone playing music directly from the phone speaker which I actually like more than using headphones. I also have my heart rate monitor connected to my phone so I can see those stats if I want them. My bike feels like a Tesla with a touchscreen on it.

This looks really neat! How does screen brightness/battery life/sound quality compare whilst biking? Have been keen to try something like this.

A battery pack case + Quad-lock is what I used to use. I got a Garmin for the battery life. But I didn't find that useful for navigation - slow and really hard to set destination and doesn't always pick the safest bike path (Google isn't great either but in my area it consistently chooses inner bike path over path that run through multi-lane roads).

Totally! All too often cars have a direct route from point A to point B while cyclists have to wind through complicated, low-speed side roads with little or no signage to help.

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...

Slightly surprised no-one's mentioned https://www.cyclestreets.net/ yet. It does have photographs of many of the segments -- see https://www.cyclestreets.net/journey/68844717/#balanced for an example. https://www.opencyclemap.org/ is also pretty useful.

I was going to say. This is a GIS problem, not a Google problem. OpenStreetMaps is a phenomenal way to approach this problem. Distilled down, you care about different properties of your spatial datasets. Cars don't so much care about topography, but you do. That data is all there.

I'm also Dutch, and even for cars Google Maps isn't the best. Traffic info maybe, but routing? Here Maps does both, with better time estimates in my experience.

Can I get turn-by-turn directions for a bicycle trip, sticking to bike paths, in OSM?

I know I can find out by trying different apps but I appreciate you potentially saving me time. Thanks!

Not to be pedantic, but OSM is just data, you're asking whether there exists software that can do this. (You might for example ask in the OsmAnd Telegram chat whether this can be done with OsmAnd.) I don't know if there is any that sticks to only cycle paths, but there is definitely software that'll avoid car-only roads like highways, try to avoid big roads where reasonable, and prefers cycle paths where available, such as OsmAnd (you can also configure routing preferences like shortest way, prefer byways, configuring your cycling speed, using elevation data...). For turn by turn instructions, that seems to be pretty standard and OsmAnd can do this too. Have you tried any software that uses OSM data?

Well yes, that's the point, I don't know what app to install. Sounds like OsmAnd is a good start, cheers.

I made some bicycle trips with maps.me [1] which uses OSM data and worked pretty well.

[1] - https://maps.me/en/download/

maps.me an offline map also have pretty good cycling routes.

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