Who here uses Topo Maps to plan their ride?

Which product do you use, and how do you like it?

I am wanting to find some hills to train in my area.

Can someone create me a sample in the Kokomo, IN 46902 area as a refrence?

Thanks,

Ryan

It would appear that you're out of luck, unless you can loosen your definition of "hill"....

https://www.topozone.com/map.asp?lat=...ad27&layer=DRG

I use the National Geographic Topo State Serise for CA. I have been using it for close to a decade and LOVE it. I spend way too much time on that program. I used it for years planning mountain bike, backpacking, and mountaineering trips. I have started using it recently to plan road rides as I am transitioning into road biking. Someone on Road Bike Review taught me a trick for drawing straight lines in TOPO when using the Route tool. The Route tool works great for drawing freehand lines on curvy roads and trails but is terrible for straight lines. Hold down the shift key while using the Route tool, move the mouse to a new location and release the Shift key, the Route tool will draw a straight line from the anchor location to the new mouse location. Very handy.

You can make nice looking maps, upload waypoints to a GPS unit, download waypoints from a GPS to TOPO, and connect a GPS to TOPO to track your current location in TOPO. You can also build a profile of your route and analyze the entire route or sections of the route to determine the grade.

I find using the Route tool in freehand mode to be about +/-10% accurate for distance. My accuracy has imporved not that I am zooming to 300% and using the Shift key when drawing my routes. It takes much longer but produces excellent results.

I'm rather fond of Routeslip.com

Something tells me this year's "Hilly Hundred" is going to be well um intresting!

And yes Howard Country is as flat as flat gets!

I use Delorme Topo USA to figure out some routes, I even used it to make a profile for this year's NYC MS Century. Not sure it's the best but it works for me. I also planned out a week-long tour of northern Vermont with it, but haven't actually done the tour yet....

I am too, but it hasn't been working very well lately. Even when I get it to load a map, it doesn't show elevation anymore. Am I the only one experiencing this?

I use Delorme Topo USA. I find it to be useful, but I hesitate to recommend it to others because is is very buggy. For example:
1. It shows roads that do not exist. Some of these roads may have been planned at one time (decades ago), but were never built. Others are on private property, but gated and not accessible to the public. Some do exist but are unpaved and do not allow bicycles (e.g., park land).
2. Some roads are in the wrong place. Sometimes they will even show the same road in 2 different locations (running parallel to itself). Some roads don't intersect in the way shown on the map.
3. Some of the street names are wrong. This and #2 can be very confusing at intersections.
4. The cumulative elevation gain calculation is usually off by 50 to 100% (double the correct value).

If you care careful to check your routes against a legitimate map (e.g., AAA paper maps) and you ignore the cumulative elevation gain feature, then this program can be useful for creating elevation profiles of your rides.

I see that RouteSlip can import from GPX. Anyone know how to get an existing TOPO route into GPX format or into RouteSlip via another method?

I have National Geographic Topo State Series for both CA and VA but use other programs for most of my mapping. I make maps for a living and so I use some more professional products (ArcGIS) and some that I have used for a while (Keyhole/Google Earth). The NG program has some useful features so I use that at times. I have used the Delorme program and found it useful as well. It comes with a larger dataset and is thus cheaper where as the NG program is state/region based and costs more for the same coverage. The datasets on both have mistakes but so do all map datasets.

USGS has pushed the infallibility of maps for so long that we have come to absolutely trust maps, however, people are now using maps more so they find a lot more mistakes. Many errors come from localities built roads according to the topography while the maps show the prior planned routes. Many errors existed on the old paper topo maps and the errors were carried over to the new digital datasets when they were digitized. Additionally, a lot of that paper to digital transfer was performed by interns for the USGS. Interns make a lot of mistakes. Even with a small error rate many errors will show up simply because of the massive amount of roads. There are other problems with mapping software and paper maps too- often the same mistake is not shared between different map types (e.g. topographic and street). So checking between two different map types is often helpful.

If your existing software can upload a route to the GPS, but doesn't make GPX files, just upload the route to the GPS and download it again to something like EasyGPS.

Or... might be time to upgrade the software. GPX is all the rage.

GPSBabel will also do conversions of almost every GPS/mapping software format into GPX.

Google is your friend.

VW

I used to use RouteSlip but was frustrated by some of its issues. Still a great product/service for free, but on long routes it took a long time to map out (point to point). I recently picked up MapSource Metro Guide (a Garmin product) - what a nice tool. Click on one point on the road & do the same to the next intersection & the software snaps to the road. Very quick way of mapping out. Just got it - now I need to upload what I did to my Edge 305....

I too am a Geographer, am GIS Coordinator for a local municipality in Southern California, and ESRI is our city standard GIS software. I agree with everything you said about accuracy of USGS maps, and would add the accuracy of the elevation data is based on 30 meter digital elevation models, which introduce their own error. However I have found the accuracy of existing trails on USGS maps within TOPO to be pretty good for my area, SoCal and the Sierra. If you want to use the USGS topo maps for mapping newer (>1970s) roads and trails good luck. Most Topos for my area were created in the late 1920 and photo revised in the 1970s. luckily for my most of the trails I ride are 100 years old.

I have TopoUSA. It's not bad, but... Well, I guess it is bad. The interface makes little sense if you're a windows user, and the road database that they use is pretty bad. But the elevation data seems okay.

You might want to try https://www.bicycleclimbs.com. If you get to your area, you can find out the top and bottom elevations by clicking on a map. If you'd like, drop me a message and I'll set you up so you can default to your location.

I like routeslip.

Google is your big brother

https://www.gmap-pedometer.com now has a Topo button (if you are just looking for hills).