For the most part, city riding is pretty well served by Google maps IMO.
A few years ago, following Google maps cycling directions me and a couple of friends on road bikes were led through muddy forest trails, old rail road tracks and green lanes on a London -> Paris <24hr attempt (we took 26hrs).
The difficulty with cycling directions is that there's not a 1 size fits all solution, a roadie needs smooth road but would prefer it quiet and scenic, a mountain biker would rather those trails we found and a commuter/hybrid would be fine on those in short bursts but probably prefer the speeds of the roads.
If I'm doing something of an "epic" route these days I'll spend a bit of time trying to find a suitable GPX that I can sync to my watch for directions - usually that'll come from Movescount, OS maps, Garmin or just someone's blog of a route. For most other things, Google maps works fine.
> A few years ago, following Google maps cycling directions me and a couple of friends on road bikes were led through muddy forest trails, old rail road tracks and green lanes on a London -> Paris <24hr attempt (we took 26hrs).
Yep. It's clear that Google Maps optimises for city riding and that's cool, but it does fall down badly on longer tours. To a large degree this is inevitable - only OSM actually has the level of surface quality information required for this sort of planning.
With my site, cycle.travel, I've taken the opposite tack: generating quiet, safe routes for leisure and touring rides, while still being as fast to generate routes as Google Maps. Sure, I want it to be usable in cities but it's not the main focus.
People have used it successfully to plan month-long tours across Europe and the US. One of my favourite bits of feedback was https://www.cyclechat.net/threads/swindon-to-orkney-a-wet-we... , where someone just punched in a start and end point at opposite ends of the UK, and rode the route it suggested without any tweaking.
https://cycle.travel/map if you want to play - always happy to hear suggestions/feedback (and thanks to Jake for including it in the post!). Currently Europe/North America/Australia/NZ only.
There's also a huge variation in what roads cyclists consider acceptable.
For example, one of our local highways has a speed limit of 55mph and a shoulder that is maybe 10 feet wide with a rumble strip near the cars. Is that a good road for bicycles or not? I'm OK with it but some of my riding friends are not. A bike path can be perfect for a family yet dangerous for practicing time trials.
I've also been surprised at how narrow some of my favorite roads are for driving. Just about any road is great if it doesn't have traffic. So a good road at lunch time is no good during rush hour.
So maybe the ultimate bicycle router would
a) Offer a bunch of preferences just like you see for cars, e.g. "avoid freeways", "avoid tolls".
b) Flag roads as "avoid", e.g. that four lane road with no shoulder next to the sidewalk.
c) Specify roads with gravel. (OSM data can have this; not sure about Google.)
> A few years ago, following Google maps cycling directions me and a couple of friends on road bikes were led through muddy forest trails, old rail road tracks and green lanes on a London -> Paris <24hr attempt (we took 26hrs).
Even in cities Google is similarly terrible, and it's actually gotten worse over the last few years as more unsuitable routes are listed as "cycle paths". I was trying to get home through London and Google sent me about a km in the wrong direction so that it could route me onto a muddy canal bank. I found myself wishing that I could simply put it in car navigation mode but avoiding routes that aren't legal for bicycles, but that's not an option either. E.g. from Great Dunmow to Bishops Stortford, all you need is to go straight down the old Roman Road, but there's no setting for Google Maps that will send you there: in bicycle mode it sends you down a muddy track, and in car mode it sends you down the A120 where bicycles are legally banned.
(Not to mention that here in Japan it simply refuses to provide cycling directions at all).
It's just not good enough, IME. It's well worth taking ten minutes to install OSMAnd and get decent directions instead.
But generally what you want from these bikes apps is a recording of your run. So that you can see a speed/elevation graph, maybe overlaid on a power graph.
These apps should also let you export/import gps data, which Google does not do.
For simple directions around town I agree that Google Maps is good enough, but as soon as you're beyond riding just to get from point A to B, it's nice to have something more.
Probably really depends on location. In Czechia the local alternative mapy.cz is vastly superior to Google Maps. It includes roads and trails that are not even drawn on Google Maps and the maps contain much more information in overall.
When I was trying to do the EuroVelo 15 route just over two years ago, it was really obvious Google Maps thought I could maintain sprint speeds all day long.
It also didn’t understand the impact of hills, which is why I cut the attempt short (1080 km) after it redirected me up a Swiss hill instead of keeping me close to the Rhine.
I would’ve preferred a GPX to follow, but I couldn’t find any of that route.
That’s why https://en.routeplanner.fietsersbond.nl/ allows the user to pick from limited stops, racer, shortest, car restricted, scenic, etc. Unfortunately, it’s only for the Netherlands.
I cycle daily in NYC and have used both Citymapper and Google Maps
Google Maps' cycling instructions route me onto streets with bicycle lanes. I haven't had any problems with it and I think it's a fine option. Maybe because NYC is the type of location google has excellent data on.
Citymapper is also good. The fastest vs quietest distinction doesn't often yield much of a change in route. What I like about citymapper is you can distinguish between riding a personal bike, or riding a bike rental. Sometimes when bringing a friend along, they rent a citibike, and it's nice to have the option for directions to take you to a docking station close to the destination.
I've used Google Maps in London, Berlin, Washington DC, Chicago, New York, SF, Austin, and a few other places. Berlin and DC were probably the worst, but it still worked. New York (where I live now) it sometimes chooses the "wrong" bike path. For instance, it'll choose a non-protected lane and insist on it even though there's a protected, 2-way bike lane a block over that's much much faster and safer.
Then again, this is a really really hard problem to solve for, and Google probably has it the best no matter where I am, so that's what my default is. I'm excited to see how Apple's will work in iOS 14 though.
A Garmin Edge model with built in OSM (8xx/1xxx models) are absolutely phenomenal at this with no mucking around with apps or any cell service required.
I think it's what almost all very serious cyclists use.
I've done 150 mile turn by turn routes on my Garmin. I've had various models for near 20 years of cycling. The only time ironically they ever have trouble is if you download a route generated by one of the various apps on the internet.. you need to be quite careful with those. The on the fly routes they generate don't ever have those issues.
When they started using the Garmin curated version of OSM it was a massive upgrade. Near me it's very near 100% coverage even of mountain bike singletrack trails through the woods. OSM has gotten incredibly good for cyclists. If you are not a road cyclist OSM has amazing coverage of bike lanes & paved paths too.
And you can actually see it in the sun and don't need to carry a pocketful of USB powerbanks to make it to your destination. The only people who need to recharge with a powerbank are the .01% who ride more than 150-200 miles without stopping at a place to charge.
It's packed with features, the track recording is solid, you can use a couple different online track providers or install brouter for offline routing, and the list of map tile providers is impressive. It seems to be targeted at Europe, but the US maps are excellent too. You can use OSM as a base layer (online, or pay ~$1 per state for their pre-rendered OSM tiles for use offline), or you can use the USGS national topo map tiles. You can also import your own.
We went on a trip to Micronesia a few years back and I used it to mark POIs and record our boat trips around the islands to show our friends when we got home. There were no available maps of the area in the app, but I was able to find some high-resolution scanned images of USGS topo maps for the islands we visited and was able to import them into the app as an offline base layer. Worked great.
We’ve been working on improving walking, cycling and scooting recently, so it’s good to hear people are finding it useful! We recently added turn-by-turn and voice instructions (in early access as part of Citymapper Club) and we’re going to be continuing to make improvements over the coming months. Want to help out? Get in touch.
Without having to deal with a commute, I've been doing a lot more biking for exercise lately. I've been looking for a way to plan out decent bike routes. I live in a corner of NJ where we several highways a couple miles a way, so it's pretty important to have a route planned so you don't accidentally end up on a road where bikes are inappropriate. This is very helpful!
Since moving to SF, I've _really_ wanted to take the plunge and start biking to work (COVID notwithstanding). I haven't done it yet, though, because I'm not super confident on routes that prefer protected lanes and minimize hills.
This post was super helpful. Citymapper wasn't even on my radar, but now I want to go grab a bike rental and give it a shot.
You'll find out after biking around for a week or two where the main corridors with minimal elevation are, especially along the main route you take. At this point after ~3 years I know 95% of the best routes to get to/from any within the city proper, and I check directions just for the ending last few blocks since that can make the difference between a steeeeeeep climb or a simple circle around 2 more blocks that's flat.
I also don't have any problem with respect to no bike lanes and crowded streets though, so that might be a bit more difficult to discover. I use Google Maps and it's pretty solid at taking you an extra .25 miles or so just to get you on a dedicated bike lane within the city, and you can always streetview points on your route if you want to double check what it looks like.
I recently used openrouteservice [1] for a trip from Bremen to Berlin (~400km) and it worked pretty well. It even lets you choose between different types of bikes (road, MTB). I downloaded the GPX into OsmAnd on my phone for turn-by-turn directions. OsmAnd also does a decent job of guiding you back onto your predefined route.
One thing that was a bit irritating was the directions at intersections, where you clearly had to go straight, but it told me to turn right and then immediately turn left. This happened when the bike path took a slight turn before the intersection, e.g. to guide you towards pedestrian traffic lights. Not sure which one of the two apps is to blame here.
Oh and when I tried Google Maps for a bit, to find my accommodation, it immediately tried to guide me through the middle of a field, with no discernible path whatsoever. So much for that..
> One thing that was a bit irritating was the directions at intersections, where you clearly had to go straight, but it told me to turn right and then immediately turn left. This happened when the bike path took a slight turn before the intersection, e.g. to guide you towards pedestrian traffic lights. Not sure which one of the two apps is to blame here.
It's your workflow that's to blame: using a GPX erases that information. If you'd planned the route in OSMAnd it would have been able to give you more road-layout-aware navigation.
In france, and in particular in Paris, https://www.geovelo.fr/ is very very good.
It knows about various Parisian specialties (going the wrong way on residential street is allowed, temporary bike paths, mixed pedestrian/bike paths, etc) that other apps don't really understand. It also gives multiple paths depending on various criterion.
OsmAnd is also decent. Google map is terribly bad.
Geovelo is indeed very practical in Paris! Well made and provides choice between "secure" and "fast" journeys, it also show how many % of the proposed paths are protected bike lanes and has shared information on hazards on the road!
It would be nice if in addition to free, it mentioned whether or not the app was FOSS.
When I was searching a couple of years ago, there were no open source bike tracking android apps, and most of the "free" ones were trialware that popped up a subscription screen as soon as you tried to do anything complicated.
Also, I love the use of the <table> tag in this article.
I use the bike route given by Google Maps as a starting point. Then I get into Street View so I can really see where I'll be riding. Is there a bike lane? How wide is the shoulder? What's the condition of the road? I like riding on roads with bike lanes or wide shoulders (where I don't care if cars are flying by me), if possible. Some of the popular routes in my area are on roads with tiny to no shoulders and 55mph speed limits. Sorry, not interested. I have yet to find any mapping site/app that finds a route that I am always happy with. They all need tweaking. I just find that Google Maps gives a good starting point and has the tools to let me come up with a route that I'm happy with.
Cycle apps using OpenStreetMap will try to find the safest routes. If using Citymapper you can explicitly choose between faster or safer (slower) routes. OSMAnd let's you choose particular types of lane.
I know the company has had some difficulties as of late, but I’ve found Strava to be quite effective for route planning. Mostly because it can route you according to “popularity”, so it’ll put you on roads that other Strava users regularly ride on.
This is great for a lot of cases, although sometimes it’ll pick a road that’s great for road biking on the weekend but not so great for commuting on weekdays.
I wonder if Strava could create two heat maps based on what I imagine are the two big clusters on their user base: road bikes and casual commuter cyclists.
Any app that the majority of cyclists are using will win this battle. It's easy to map known bike trails, what's difficult is mapping a good road to bike on. There's so many factors that go into this, but the best and easiest way to get this data seems to be tracking what roads most cyclists are riding. This is exactly why strava heat map is the best for route planning IMHO. You can travel to any area and look at the heatmap surrounding you and instantly have an idea of what roads are heavy cycled.
I plan with Strava using it's popularity heat map (I road 9000 miles in 2019). I then cycle using my Garmin 520 bike computer, which is painful to use for directions, but up to the abuse particularly on single track, and I try to use memory based on previewing with street view and satellite photos while planning. I often have to backtrack, typically uphill. But most of the time I'm repeating rides, at which point I'm going off memory.
For those who aren't strong and fearless cyclists, Strava can be helpful, but be careful and double-check those routes. I've seen some pretty dangerous segments that I have been very scared on, and they show up red-hot on Strava. Why? Probably because some die-hards go that way a lot, or go that way in a group. And those are probably the types of people that use Strava more than the casual commuter.
In my city there's a 5 lane bridge, shoulder just wide enough for drains, and nothing but a 3-ft concrete barrier 60 or 70 feet above the river. The speed limit is 45, but people drive like that's a mild suggestion. This is a very hot cycle route on Strava for some reason, but I think it's frightening.
I have an eMTB and OSMAnd is handy to find trails, classified with difficulty level (when you click on it), and ability to choose to route you to avoid asphalt routes, I just have to find how to add a stylesheet to show colors based on difficulty, and set up BRouter to route only on MTB trails.
I’ve been looking for a good app like this for a while. When commuting in a new area or going on ride such as https://rootsrated.com/san-francisco-ca/cycling/paradise-loo... it’s great to have turn by turn direction which gets on your bike computer and ALSO on your watch. I’m looking forward to apple maps, however I doubt it would be supporting bike loop routes such as paradise loop.
[+] [-] BattyMilk|5 years ago|reply
A few years ago, following Google maps cycling directions me and a couple of friends on road bikes were led through muddy forest trails, old rail road tracks and green lanes on a London -> Paris <24hr attempt (we took 26hrs).
The difficulty with cycling directions is that there's not a 1 size fits all solution, a roadie needs smooth road but would prefer it quiet and scenic, a mountain biker would rather those trails we found and a commuter/hybrid would be fine on those in short bursts but probably prefer the speeds of the roads.
If I'm doing something of an "epic" route these days I'll spend a bit of time trying to find a suitable GPX that I can sync to my watch for directions - usually that'll come from Movescount, OS maps, Garmin or just someone's blog of a route. For most other things, Google maps works fine.
[+] [-] Doctor_Fegg|5 years ago|reply
Yep. It's clear that Google Maps optimises for city riding and that's cool, but it does fall down badly on longer tours. To a large degree this is inevitable - only OSM actually has the level of surface quality information required for this sort of planning.
With my site, cycle.travel, I've taken the opposite tack: generating quiet, safe routes for leisure and touring rides, while still being as fast to generate routes as Google Maps. Sure, I want it to be usable in cities but it's not the main focus.
People have used it successfully to plan month-long tours across Europe and the US. One of my favourite bits of feedback was https://www.cyclechat.net/threads/swindon-to-orkney-a-wet-we... , where someone just punched in a start and end point at opposite ends of the UK, and rode the route it suggested without any tweaking.
https://cycle.travel/map if you want to play - always happy to hear suggestions/feedback (and thanks to Jake for including it in the post!). Currently Europe/North America/Australia/NZ only.
[+] [-] dockd|5 years ago|reply
For example, one of our local highways has a speed limit of 55mph and a shoulder that is maybe 10 feet wide with a rumble strip near the cars. Is that a good road for bicycles or not? I'm OK with it but some of my riding friends are not. A bike path can be perfect for a family yet dangerous for practicing time trials.
I've also been surprised at how narrow some of my favorite roads are for driving. Just about any road is great if it doesn't have traffic. So a good road at lunch time is no good during rush hour.
So maybe the ultimate bicycle router would a) Offer a bunch of preferences just like you see for cars, e.g. "avoid freeways", "avoid tolls". b) Flag roads as "avoid", e.g. that four lane road with no shoulder next to the sidewalk. c) Specify roads with gravel. (OSM data can have this; not sure about Google.)
[+] [-] lmm|5 years ago|reply
Even in cities Google is similarly terrible, and it's actually gotten worse over the last few years as more unsuitable routes are listed as "cycle paths". I was trying to get home through London and Google sent me about a km in the wrong direction so that it could route me onto a muddy canal bank. I found myself wishing that I could simply put it in car navigation mode but avoiding routes that aren't legal for bicycles, but that's not an option either. E.g. from Great Dunmow to Bishops Stortford, all you need is to go straight down the old Roman Road, but there's no setting for Google Maps that will send you there: in bicycle mode it sends you down a muddy track, and in car mode it sends you down the A120 where bicycles are legally banned.
(Not to mention that here in Japan it simply refuses to provide cycling directions at all).
It's just not good enough, IME. It's well worth taking ten minutes to install OSMAnd and get decent directions instead.
[+] [-] Naac|5 years ago|reply
These apps should also let you export/import gps data, which Google does not do.
For simple directions around town I agree that Google Maps is good enough, but as soon as you're beyond riding just to get from point A to B, it's nice to have something more.
[+] [-] Scea91|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ben_w|5 years ago|reply
It also didn’t understand the impact of hills, which is why I cut the attempt short (1080 km) after it redirected me up a Swiss hill instead of keeping me close to the Rhine.
I would’ve preferred a GPX to follow, but I couldn’t find any of that route.
[+] [-] Someone|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistersquid|5 years ago|reply
This is unacceptable given that cycling the wrong way is illegal and dangerous.
[+] [-] golemiprague|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] johnnybaptist|5 years ago|reply
Google Maps' cycling instructions route me onto streets with bicycle lanes. I haven't had any problems with it and I think it's a fine option. Maybe because NYC is the type of location google has excellent data on.
Citymapper is also good. The fastest vs quietest distinction doesn't often yield much of a change in route. What I like about citymapper is you can distinguish between riding a personal bike, or riding a bike rental. Sometimes when bringing a friend along, they rent a citibike, and it's nice to have the option for directions to take you to a docking station close to the destination.
[+] [-] cguess|5 years ago|reply
Then again, this is a really really hard problem to solve for, and Google probably has it the best no matter where I am, so that's what my default is. I'm excited to see how Apple's will work in iOS 14 though.
[+] [-] ben7799|5 years ago|reply
I think it's what almost all very serious cyclists use.
I've done 150 mile turn by turn routes on my Garmin. I've had various models for near 20 years of cycling. The only time ironically they ever have trouble is if you download a route generated by one of the various apps on the internet.. you need to be quite careful with those. The on the fly routes they generate don't ever have those issues.
When they started using the Garmin curated version of OSM it was a massive upgrade. Near me it's very near 100% coverage even of mountain bike singletrack trails through the woods. OSM has gotten incredibly good for cyclists. If you are not a road cyclist OSM has amazing coverage of bike lanes & paved paths too.
And you can actually see it in the sun and don't need to carry a pocketful of USB powerbanks to make it to your destination. The only people who need to recharge with a powerbank are the .01% who ride more than 150-200 miles without stopping at a place to charge.
[+] [-] Fwirt|5 years ago|reply
https://www.locusmap.eu/
It's packed with features, the track recording is solid, you can use a couple different online track providers or install brouter for offline routing, and the list of map tile providers is impressive. It seems to be targeted at Europe, but the US maps are excellent too. You can use OSM as a base layer (online, or pay ~$1 per state for their pre-rendered OSM tiles for use offline), or you can use the USGS national topo map tiles. You can also import your own.
We went on a trip to Micronesia a few years back and I used it to mark POIs and record our boat trips around the islands to show our friends when we got home. There were no available maps of the area in the app, but I was able to find some high-resolution scanned images of USGS topo maps for the islands we visited and was able to import them into the app as an offline base layer. Worked great.
[+] [-] jakecopp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fredley|5 years ago|reply
We’ve been working on improving walking, cycling and scooting recently, so it’s good to hear people are finding it useful! We recently added turn-by-turn and voice instructions (in early access as part of Citymapper Club) and we’re going to be continuing to make improvements over the coming months. Want to help out? Get in touch.
[+] [-] jakecopp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakecopp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qnsi|5 years ago|reply
sadly its not available in my city Warsaw, Poland :(
Thank you for taking time
[+] [-] jkingsbery|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sriacha|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SmellTheGlove|5 years ago|reply
This post was super helpful. Citymapper wasn't even on my radar, but now I want to go grab a bike rental and give it a shot.
[+] [-] secondstring|5 years ago|reply
I also don't have any problem with respect to no bike lanes and crowded streets though, so that might be a bit more difficult to discover. I use Google Maps and it's pretty solid at taking you an extra .25 miles or so just to get you on a dedicated bike lane within the city, and you can always streetview points on your route if you want to double check what it looks like.
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yunusabd|5 years ago|reply
One thing that was a bit irritating was the directions at intersections, where you clearly had to go straight, but it told me to turn right and then immediately turn left. This happened when the bike path took a slight turn before the intersection, e.g. to guide you towards pedestrian traffic lights. Not sure which one of the two apps is to blame here.
Oh and when I tried Google Maps for a bit, to find my accommodation, it immediately tried to guide me through the middle of a field, with no discernible path whatsoever. So much for that..
[1] https://maps.openrouteservice.org
[+] [-] lmm|5 years ago|reply
It's your workflow that's to blame: using a GPX erases that information. If you'd planned the route in OSMAnd it would have been able to give you more road-layout-aware navigation.
[+] [-] Drup|5 years ago|reply
OsmAnd is also decent. Google map is terribly bad.
[+] [-] gregoriol|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kemayo|5 years ago|reply
(But not everywhere yet. I'm in the midwest, and the beta just says cycling directions aren't available in my area.)
[+] [-] acwan93|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Naac|5 years ago|reply
When I was searching a couple of years ago, there were no open source bike tracking android apps, and most of the "free" ones were trialware that popped up a subscription screen as soon as you tried to do anything complicated.
Also, I love the use of the <table> tag in this article.
[+] [-] Mediterraneo10|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hondo77|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakecopp|5 years ago|reply
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bicycle
Cycle apps using OpenStreetMap will try to find the safest routes. If using Citymapper you can explicitly choose between faster or safer (slower) routes. OSMAnd let's you choose particular types of lane.
[+] [-] blueski|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakecopp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quicklime|5 years ago|reply
This is great for a lot of cases, although sometimes it’ll pick a road that’s great for road biking on the weekend but not so great for commuting on weekdays.
I wonder if Strava could create two heat maps based on what I imagine are the two big clusters on their user base: road bikes and casual commuter cyclists.
[+] [-] seaerkin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 762236|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falkd|5 years ago|reply
In my city there's a 5 lane bridge, shoulder just wide enough for drains, and nothing but a 3-ft concrete barrier 60 or 70 feet above the river. The speed limit is 45, but people drive like that's a mild suggestion. This is a very hot cycle route on Strava for some reason, but I think it's frightening.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hokkos|5 years ago|reply
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:mtb:scale
https://osmand.net/features/navigation-profiles
http://brouter.de/brouter-web
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nikita|5 years ago|reply