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Comment by Doctor_Fegg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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!

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 :)

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...

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.

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