Originally Posted by
revcp
i hate it when people say this, so I hesitate to do so, but you have to be doing something wrong. It follows roads and trails, even if the clicked distance between points is many miles apart. For example, I started a track at the intersection of the Mississippi River Trail and the Katy Trail west of Saint Louis, and then clicked the end of the Katy in Clinton, MO. It laid the track on the Katy Trail the entire way. It does the same thing with roads, and it uses the specifications in the drop down selections from the upper right to create the route according to speed, safety, fewest miles, etc. I've used ridewithgps. This is better.
It didn't work the first time, but now it does, I don't know why didn't snap to roads when I tried it before. And I couldn't see how to move the map to a different area until I clicked the "search" icon. That worked. And it does snap to roads consistently now. Can you switch to drawing straight lines? I need that occasionally on ridewithgps where there's just a short sidewalk connection between two roads.
Why do you like it better? Is it the choices list for routing based on fastest or safest, etc? That sounds useful.
It seems okay for routing, but doesn't have much detail on hills. ridewithgps is very good for quickly evaluating climbs. Brouter's Open Cycle Map layer does have a minimalist hill shading, but I check the red elevation chart all the time as I'm drawing routes.
EDIT--
I found the bottom right icon for the elevation chart. It's helpful, but not as useful as the ridewithgps version -- which shows details within the selected climb, and more stats.
How do you save a route? There must be a way, but I can't find it. (I have hundreds of named routes on ridewithgps)
I see this is "version 0.7.0" so it's still considered to be experimental / beta version. I'll check back sometime and see if there's new features added.