iPhone app to show route and directions...
 

Hi, I have been using a Garmin Edge 810 to store routes I create in RideWithGPS so I know where to turn, etc. However, I have been having trouble with it, and thus I am looking for a good application that can sort of do the same on my iPhone.

In a nutshell, what I do is the following:
1) Use RideWithGPS to plan a route. I can then export this route as a GPX, KML, or other file format
2) The app would take this file/route, and would display it overlaying it on a map. As I cycle, it would show where I am and where I am supposed to go. Typical gps turn-by-turn direction stuff

That's it. No need for rerouting or anything like that. Frankly, if I just knew how to overlay a GPX track onto Google Maps on my iphone, so I can see it as I am using Google Maps that would be all that I need.

I am hoping somebody has an idea on how to do this.

Thanks in advance, and Happy upcoming New Year.

--Luis

What sort of trouble are you having with the Garmin? I've done what you described many times on Garmin 500 and 800 and it seems to work fine.

Well, when I take a wrong turn, the Garmin sometimes gets "stuck" on the old route. Or, worse, sometimes there's a blockage on the road that was on the original route, and I have to take an improvised detour.... I have had the Garmin telling me to "do a U turn" for miles and not recognizing that I had already gotten onto the path some miles ahead.

Finally, the other thing I want to do is better mapping. Imagine this, I am riding on the route and both Garmin and myself are happy... and then a blockage happens. At that moment, I would love to have Google Maps on the iPhone, with its nice "bike trails" overlap and easy pinch zoom etc so I can decide how to overcome the blockage. The screen of the Garmin is small, resolution is poor, and is not well suited to browse the map around to find an alternative. It is while I am doing this "browsing" for an alternate path that having the pre-planned original route displayed is what would help me. That way I can see what was the supposed route and how I can loop around the blockage.

I can of course "ride away" and trust that Garmin will get me back on track but, as I have said, several times when I have done that it has stubbornly made me go back to some arbitrary point (where it lost the course to begin with?) and I have learned not to trust it...

Hope this helps, don't know how best to explain it :-)


Luis

I don't know about loading a GPX onto Google Maps in a way that you can see "live" where you are, but if you can upload your GPX file where it can be accessed via a standard "http://" URL (obviously ending in ".gpx"), you can feed that URL to Google Maps as its "location" and it will display the route.

Secondly, I set my Edge 705 not to auto-reroute. I find that the auto-reroute loses my original route if I go off-route. That's a problem because even if I backtrack to where I went off-route, it may no longer have my original, carefully planned route that avoided the busy roads. With auto-rerouting turned off, I can still see where I am relative to where I was supposed to be—even if I was obliged to detour by some roadblock—so I at least have some chance of "manually" navigating back (or forward) to where I can resume my route.

Other problems I've run into with my Garmin: If the route has lots of successive, closely spaced turns, it can fail to keep up with your actual location and lose track of where you are. If you have a route that backtracks along the same road/path later on, it can get confused about whether you're outbound or inbound and start directing you to "make a U turn". I avoid that by splitting such routes into separate sub-routes.

From everything I've seen to date, dedicated bike GPS units still have much better battery life than smartphones actively using GPS. You can get around it with external battery power, though, at the cost of added weight.

FWIW, closest I've come to crashing in recent memory was while dorking around with my iPhone GPS app. Eyes off the road, one hand on the bars.... not good.

MotionX and Cyclemeter both work well, as does Strava, for mapping your rides as you do them, IE in hindsight. Not sure of a "turn by turn" GPS biking app.

I use Runtastic Road Bike Pro and it works like a charm. You can use the route planner on the website and it syncs automatically with the app. Also has the GPX import function I guess. Even if it doesn't, the route planner will find cycling paths if available and avoid highways. It uses the native iOS map API so you'll be able to buffer the vectorial maps which works much faster than Google maps. I used it for century rides and cross border trips many times and even without cellular data it is very accurate.

Best thing to do in that case is just stop the course. When you know you're back on a road that is on the original course, just start it up again. You can start a course anywhere, not just at the start.