Steve B.

I find when creating routes, that if I’ve selected Cycling as the choice, vs. Driving or Walking, then it will detour me off a main road and onto parallel side streets. Sometimes annoying, but if I go back to Driving as the method, doesn’t detour anywhere near as often. I will then only choose Cycling if I’m going to use a path of some sorts. Then I switch back.

rm -rf

ridewithgps ancient history!
Back before 2010, we were using mapmyride.com for creating routes. It was slow and tedious, with no "follow roads" option -- just zoom way in and repeatedly click down the road, to make a route from straight line segments. click, click, click... Slow! A lot better than nothing, though -- we got turn distances and ride mileage, and primitive elevation info.

I heard about this new "ride with gps" site, and tried it out. My oldest route is still there, dated 3/12/2010. With a URL sequence number in the 40,000 range. My newest route is numbered 46,280,000. (it's a sequential counter that's used for both routes and rides.) Did it have "follow roads" ability from the beginning? I don't remember, and the early routes have obvious straight line joins, but perhaps it just wasn't as fine-grained data as it is now.

"follow roads"! that was such a game changer. It became easy to route on one road, change my mind, undo and reroute.

rm -rf

A quick test of Driving vs Cycling: I clicked a start point, then an ending point way across the city. I got routed onto the interstate -- of course it did! So it's also going to pick those 50 mph 4-lane busy roads too.

Driving mode works with a local riverfront park. The road is never busy, and the wide sidewalk/bike path has lots of walkers, so the road is much better. rwgps wants to use the displayed bike path, of course. Driving mode just stays on the road, good. It's probably usable out in the country where I make most of my routes.

I have seen rwgps take farm roads as shortcuts. Sometimes these don't even go all the way through, and aren't suitable for road bikes at all. Are they even public? They do show on the maps.

Steve B.

Well, yes, of course it’s going to put you on a highway if you let it choose to create the route by selecting start and end only, it’s obvious that you need to be aware this is how the route creater program thinks and gain control by manually selecting a road alternative that’s not the interstate. It lets you do that.

mev

Last year I cycled ~6600 mile route visiting 26 state capitols and definitely had differences in my preferences on a driving vs bicycling route.
- Cycling through most of South Dakota I was better off picking the driving route because of the issue you mentioned. I wasn't anywhere close to an Interstate and the underlying maps would otherwise present roads with "unknown" surface as paved and occasionally pick routes that were private or didn't go through
- Cycling through northeast Ohio even roads I would otherwise think weren't major would have lots of traffic and narrow shoulders and so I was better off with the bicycling directions

In Central Texas I occasionally have a blend of both. As an example, last weekend I cycled from Austin to College Station. The RWGPS bicycle route picked what essentially looked like a farm path that wasn't a public road and I'm not sure it would have connect. On the other hand we also have large metro areas between Austin/San Antonio and towards Houston/Dallas where I don't want RWGPS auto routes that put me onto urban highways and in urban areas have minimal issue with unpaved or incomplete routes.