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Show HN: RouteScout – A bike routing app that lets you love or hate hills

19 points| enzovt | 6 months ago

Hi HN, I’m a high school student in Seattle who loves riding hills.

I found that route makers like Google Maps get you from point A to B on a bike, but they don’t give you fun routes. So i made my own

RouteScout lets you: - Control the surfaces (never gravel or dirt with a road bike!) on the route - Indicate your preference for hills (I LOVE or HATE hills gives you different routes) - Prefer routes with bike lanes and cycling paths and roads made for bikes. - Filter types of roads (big roads gone!) - And when looping around it won’t take you back on the same exact road on the way back

*Upcoming feature*: Being able to use your previous activities from Strava to give you the option to favor roads that you’ve never been on (or have been on).

The app is free forever (without selling daya). Try it here: https://routescout.tennisbowling.com

I wrote all of the routing, database, and logic (no AI) So if you end up running into any issues please email me at rs@tennisbowling.com and i’ll fix them asap.

8 comments

enzovt|6 months ago

Hey HN!

I’d also be super down if anyone is interested in discussing how it works under the hood (and i’m planning on open sourcing this).

But generally the stack is rust using postgres which has all of the osm nodes stored inside it + other info (elevation, etc), and then it uses astar with your settings to make your route.

danburbridge|6 months ago

This is a great idea - I love the maximise hills option :) It reminds me of one of our clubs TT routes which featured 1100M (3600ft) of climbing in 28miles, this would be great for generating some similar routes I reckon.

https://cyclinguphill.com/bristol-south-mega-hilly/

enzovt|6 months ago

Yeah exactly. I always ride around wanting more hills in my routes but no route makers have a maximize pain button :) so this was my solution. I've been working on it for about a year and a half

unop|6 months ago

I like the idea but I live in Europe and that and some skill issues couldn't get a route planned.

It would be nice if the route start and end selections could be from points ona map (for the outdoorsy types like me) as the text fields find nothing for me.

The landmark and node Explorer modes didn't show any results.

enzovt|6 months ago

Yeah, no EU support yet :S. I'm sorry for that. I'm working on it but for the EU it's really hard since i need to overlap the elevation DEMs (which countries make so hard to find high quality ones, and for EU it's split between all the countries). then that has to be overlayed onto the osm data and then finally computed into nodes etc.