Machka 

This is a three part question ...

1) Someone directed me to the following online mapping program: https://www.mapmyride.com/

I'm VERY impressed with the fact that it includes Canada!! But I can't seem to figure out how to get it to map a route (follow the road) without having to click on every single bend in the road. Have you used this program? If so, can you pass along some tips?


2) If I map a 110 km route through the moutains (clicking on every single bend in the road to follow the road as accurately as possible) and it gives me the following elevation information:

max: 7769ft
min: 2593ft
ascent: 16275ft
descent: 14154ft

What does that mean? How many feet did I climb?


3) Do you know of any other online mapping programs which include elevations ... and which include Canada?

Godwin

I usually use bikely, it's similar but it shows you a good graph (elevation profile) of your ride that makes sense. I haven't found one yet that will follow roads which would be really great, but you can learn to make routes fairly quickly using the point to point system.

Mash Master

the mapper on toporoute follows the road. I wish that bikely would have that feature. I also wish google maps had bike trails on it.

Machka 

I'm mapping my 600K route right now with mapmyroute, and if I wasn't confused before, I'm completely baffled now.

As I map, the ascent number keeps going up and down and up and down. Instead, shouldn't it add up all the ascents together to come to some total by the end of the ride? And add up all the descents together to come to a total for that as well?

Even the maximum elevation is changing ... how can I reach an elevation of 1000m at one point on the route, then 50 kms down the road, my maximum elevation drops to 950m?

iab

1. I don't know about mapmyride.com, but the more points you put down, the more accurate it is with elevations. For example, if there is a long straight and you use two points to desiginate the road, if there is a hill between the points, the program will not measure the the elevation gain of the hill. In other words, elevation measurements are not continuous, the program only knows the elevations or the points you choose.

2. 16,275 ft

3. routeslip.com - works just about in every part of the world

Starclimber

When Toporoute doesn't read like this...

"May 29, 2007: Toporoute is temporarily down. We're sorry for the inconvenience. Please check back tomorrow."

...it will follow the road faithfully with a few clicks. If the road is especially twisty you need to select shorter portions, and you'd probably have to map your brevet in 2 or 3 chunks.

Machka 

I'm about to embark on a Bikely adventure ... mapping my 600K route. But here's a question ... how do you get ride of all the Google junk on the right? Pity about Bikely using Google technology, but I'll see how it works.

Machka 

If you've used www.bikely.com ... how accurate did you find it to be? How easy to use? Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but it seemed incredibly S-L-O-W and rather maddening to use with the roads lurching all over the place when I'm trying to click on them, and then clicking and having nothing happen. And one view gives me my whole route ... but the next view indicates that it is missing part of the route.

I finally closed it down ... too frustrating.

songfta

I find Bikely fairly accurate, but it does slow down if you're meticulous about plotting your path. I tend to zoom in quite a bit, adding lots of points to things like tight, switchback turns, and once i get over 500 reference points (with or without annotation), it starts to bog down. If you're patient, it works out in the end, but it's annoying.

RacerMike

you could try routeslip.com also.

songfta

Routeslip suffers from the fact that it's no longer being developed or maintained by its author, so it has some funky bugs that drive me nuts when i try to lay out routes (e.g. freezes, dropped legs of rides, etc.).

That's why I'm using Bikely and MapMyRide a lot more these days.

curiouskid55

max: 7769ft highest elevation reached realtive to sea level which is 0
min: 2593ft lowest elevation reached relative to sea level which is still 0
ascent: 16275ft cumalitive total of elevation gain (going up)
descent: 14154ft cumalitive total of elevation loss (going ...down)


Ascent and descent may not match if your start and stop point were not the same or because of plotting errors. The changes you are seeing are point to point as you plot. When you save the route you will get the totals.

Boz1984

I do enjoy toporoute.com, as it has the follow road feature, however, Ive noticed that its elevation can be wierd, IE: not giving total ascent at all.

johnny99

I don't think any of the on-line mapping programs will give you an accurate cumulative elevation gain. Same goes for consumer-grade topo mapping programs. All these programs use topo data based on the average elevation of some terrain grid, but real-world roads do not follow the average terrain. The road will follow the smoothest possible contours of the terrain and thus have much less ups and downs and much less total elevation gain. On a hilly route, don't be surprised if your altimeter reads half the cumulative elevation gain as a computer program.

Those topo programs are good for telling you the general terrain profile of a route, i.e., where the long climbs are going to be. That helps you plan your energy expenditures for the ride. You can probably estimate the cumulative elevation gain by just adding up the long climbs (greater than 0.5 or 1 mile) and ignoring all the smaller climbs (which may or may not appear in reality).

Bacchusbill

+1

I just entered my normal weekday city route on mapmyride.com and it said I had 560 ft of climbing and reached a max of 160ft! HA! The closest thing I see to a hill is the levee and it can't be more than a total of 30 vertical feet.