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Gravel Map

gravelmap.com

55 pointsjxmorris1217 comments

I'm in the process of planning a 6-8 day bike tour and wanting to keep it on gravel roads as much as possible. I've done about 150 days of bike touring in the past on paved roads, and I'm done rolling the dice with my life now that apps are so addictive that drivers can't help scrolling while operating a moving vehicle.

Gravelmaps has been a huge help, so has google maps using street view to check for gravel or if necessary the width of the shoulder. Even on side roads that haven't been streetview'd you can still check it at intersections to see.

The planning is VERY time consuming though, lots of permutations of routes to get between 2 points when the goal is to stay off paved surfaces each with various tradeoffs. It would be VERY cool if gravelmap let you input a start and end point and gave you a best route suggestion. Or even if google let you select gravel only.

I’m kind of in the same boat. A couple of years ago I did a 700k tour on virtually only minor roads (I believe about 10k was on roads with a center line). I used cycle.travel[1]. I’m in Europe, not sure how good it is elsewhere, but here it is incomprehensibly better than Google for this purpose.

[1] https://cycle.travel/map

I've had the same problems. Planned bike rides, and often ending up in too rough terrain where I have to push or even carry my bike as it was suddenly a trail and not gravel road.

To help that, I've actually started contributing to Street View. Mounted a 360 cam high over my helmet when I bike, and then use that photo to upload to Mapillary (CC license) and Google.

One is allowed to replace the bottom with a logo ("nadir cap") to hide myself, and because of that I often get people reaching out telling me how useful to check conditions. Not just hardcore bikers, but lots of people just wondering if they can bring their stroller or an elderly family member on some forest walk.

My tooling is here if anyone's interested https://github.com/Matsemann/matsemanns-streetview-tools/

Of course, when I encounter errors I also want to fix that in Open Street Map so that it propagates to other tools. But most casual people aren't using advanced tools to plan their small trip, so having imagery is useful I believe.

How does this compare to Komoot? I usually use that, but I am based in the Netherlands. What i like in ko,oot is that cyclists upload photos. This allows me to see what the road looks like.

>It would be VERY cool if gravelmap let you input a start and end point and gave you a best route suggestion.

This is exactly why gravelmap and googlemaps isn't cool - the data is siloed.

When the data is open people can build their own routing engines:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/List_of_OSM-based_servic...

B-router is good, but like all of them, constrained by data quality:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/BRouter

https://bikerouter.de/ is running brouter-web and has some gravel routing profiles installed. The FFMbyBicycle profile has an experimental car-avoiding option.

The new b-router support for pseudotags looks useful (PDF) https://brouter.de/essbee/infoPseudoTags.html for tracking rivers and avoiding paths adjacent to roads.

Another way of looking at the data with Overpass Turbo: https://little-maps.com/2022/03/05/planning-a-gravel-ride-th...

Overpass Turbo rocks for custom maps! There is market for a user friendlier version of it, though.

Is gravel about it being gravel or about it being no cars? I feel like it's no cars, but I wish people would just say that. Too many people are afraid to speak out about cars for some reason. Perhaps being anti-car is still seen as too hipster or contrarian or something.

Interesting, this also released recently: https://rideslipstream.ai/

So far I’ve found these to be lackluster for planning and I just end up going out and seeing what kind of trouble I get into.

Other places I plan is via Strava, Komoot or Garmin Connect - the heat maps help a lot to know where other people ride different types of bikes (road/gravel/mtb).

That'a hard problem I spent some time thinking about and helping. I contributed to OSM surface type on roads. But we certainly lack publicly known user friendly software to mark surface for OSM and then to plan for your bike type. I am happy that work is ongoing, but unhappy with how hard it still is.

And certainly vwru unhappy when people help siloed maps and not shared ones like OSM.

Anyone from Portland who can explain the dirt/gravel roads shown in the Eastmoreland/Errol Heights area? For example, on Malden between 45th and 52nd.

Street View shows these are residential roads mired in mud and muck -- surprising for being in a built-up populated area of the city.

Is this yours?

It's a tough problem, I think. It's missing a lot of roads where I am in Bend, Oregon. Basically, anywhere in the western US with Forest Service or BLM land is going to have a ton of gravel roads. The trick is "are they pleasant to ride on?"

One issue with gravelmap in my area is that some people don't post the best routes so they don't get crowded...

Wow, that's pretty silly. These are roads, after all; there's tons of room for cyclists.

Strava also has a route planner that displays surface types.

On Strava specifically it is hard to differentiate between "gravel bike" and "full suspension mountain bike"

Here in the northeast us i know of at least one org that actually does the on-the-ground research to ride and take notes on many sections of road. There's no good way to get a read on conditions otherwise.

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