harlechjoe
Guest
I have been using the Cycle streets or the cycle.tourer mapping system that have pros and cons. I wondered if members have found anything better. Your advice will be welcomed, thank you.
I have been using the Cycle streets or the cycle.tourer mapping system that have pros and cons. I wondered if members have found anything better. Your advice will be welcomed, thank you.
Cycle.tourer? Do you mean cycle.travel?
"Anything better" is entirely subjective. It would be helpful if you could outline your problems with any system. A road cyclist is different to a gravel or touring cyclist in terms of preferences.
For what it's worth I am a huge Cycle.Travel fan but supplement it at times with others.
For example until recently, CT was pretty poor at locating an address whereas Komoot was excellent at that. (Not so much the route to get there!). Recently it has improved significantly and I can often locate a business simply by starting to type it's name.
CT tends to take slightly meandering routes or skirt towns. Depending on my needs for the day I may prefer a more direct route or to go through a town.
Also, different planners will work better in different ways. My understanding is that CT has a better awareness of the vagaries of British off-road labelling than Komoot as an example.
Also different planners will work better or worse in different areas.
A huge advantage of CT is that the developer is contactable on their forum to help with questions or issues and will probably read this at some stage since they are a member here. Komoot don't reply to me anymore
Thank you for your feedback and yes, I mean't cycle.travel; problem wise the 'Gravel' option takes me to places I don't want to go and the 'Paved' route can stray into hostile traffic conditions. So I tend to favour the 'Any' route option and take the rough with the smooth.
Well, the developer has asked for feedback on the new gravel option. You can make your contribution here:
https://cycle.travel/forum/2
I'd definitely suggest posting about the roads with hostile traffic although again, that's a subjective term.
However, "places I don't want to go" is pretty vague.
Are we talking about places (towns, villages etc.) or just terrain that you don't like? If it's the former a viapoint can be added to route you away from it. The elevation profile is visible (and recently improved) to warn of hilly bits that can be avoided or sought out. If it's a barrier of some kind or a surface totally unsuitable for a gravel bike then feedback will help improve the service for all.
No planner is going to be 100% error free (although CT is more reliable than most) and some things are just subjective - you may not like it but I could well love it.
Depending on what you use to actually navigate (paper notes, phone, GPS, maps) there may be handy hints to find alternatives. I heartily recommend Osmand, a phone app. It's not easy to learn how to use but incredibly valuable for changing plans on a whim as well as having a huge database of Points of Interest.