snerseb

Hi,

I just finished a 2 month long adventure across America, and along the way met many fellow cyclists. One of the major topics we would talk about was routing and maps.

I stuck to the Adventure Cycling Maps (Western Express and Trans-Am) most of the way, but once I would leave the route I depended on state maps and local know-how. The Adventure Cycling Maps are great, but it is a significantly different experience when you get off the "well traveled path."

We all agreed it would be great to have an online site where bicycle tourists could go to plan routes. This information is spread out through many individual bike maps, but would be very useful in a centralized place. So, being pretty handy with computers, I have started looking into building a site like this.

The features that seem most useful to cyclists would be:

-highlighted roads that are "choice routes" (would even be great to have specific info about the road, like road quality, shoulder size, etc...)
-services available (not get stuck again without food/water in a mysteriously disappearing town that looks big on the state map)
-elevation gain/loss

This would be based on the Google Maps API, and all of the routes and services would be overlayed on top of the normal Google Map.

So, if anyone has any other recommendations of what should be included in this, I would appreciate the feedback. And also, if this already exists, that would save me some work.

Thank you.

Chris Turitzin

gregw

This would be great!!! There are a couple that already exist, but are more designed for short loop routes that that people post. (https://www.mapmyride.com/) The best touring map IMHO would be one map of the globe (USA to start with) that all of the routes people submit live on. That way you could connect routes as needed to go where you want to. We would need a standard set of symbols like the ACA maps for grocery, camping etc. The other major function that is lacking on other sites is a good print function, where you can put several sections of route on a single 8 1/2" x 11" also like the ACA maps. Google maps now has an option for avoiding highways, but it still takes you on the next biggest roads, which usually is still too much traffic, maybe you could modify that feature for the lightest traffic roads instead.
This should get a lot of feedback. Neil of Crazy Guy fame expressed interest in this kind of map, but I don't think he has time to attempt it.

More as I think about it.
Greg

DuckFat

Isn't www.bikely.com the kind of thing you are talking about?

gregw

I checked out this site for the route I'm planning and unless I'm missing something (which, by the way, happens often) it could not help me. OK, I'm planning a route from Louisville, Ky., north between the great lakes into Canada then west to Prince Rupert, then south to the Northern Tier. Bikely had nothing for me.

The site I described would show a map of the world, zoom in to mid-south USA, start to see blue lines indicating routes submitted to the site, see how many follow close to the route I'm interested in and connect as many as possible to complete my route. To connect different routes I would use the google routing tool modified to use the least traveled roads and look for interesting things to see along the way and / or campgrounds. This is what for me would be useful.

gregw

bump