Originally Posted by
raybo
I planned my recent ride from Amsterdam to Passau across Western Europe using Strava's heat map:
http://labs.strava.com/heatmap.
This is a compilation of all the routes ridden for an entire year by Strava's user base. It will let you route from A to B and drag the route to other road, as well as, set waypoints for the route to go through. It was very useful on the Western Europe route. I used much of it on my trip.
Note that Germany and Austria don't allow Google street view and some of the smaller countries have limited street view coverage.
In some areas, like the one I live in, Strava heat maps don't offer up much information. The best riding between Eugene and the coast won't really show up because there are so few cyclists riding them with Strava. Ditto for getting over the Cascades from here. Some really poor routes show up because the ACA lists them, apparently without doing their fieldwork.
I tend to find my own routes and 90% of the time they are better for me than what is popular. Mostly, this involves being able to read a map with Google maps being a last resort. Of course, what is better for me may be horrid for you. I know many riders don't like hills. Some folks want a hotel at the end of the day. (I enjoy this at times too.) For others, having no stores or restaurants available would ruin the day. For others, a bit of gravel is a deal breaker. Some even dislike roads without shoulders, even though many of these have near-zero motorized traffic.
As for me, give me some knowledge of my next food source, some hope of cleaning up at day's end, water I can filter and low traffic counts and I'm happy. Pavement is nice, but not required and I expect the low-traffic routes to have lots of climbing since the flat routes are easy to widen and thus attract more cars and trucks.