It impacts us all different amounts, depending on how much time we spend studying maps each day. A person on tour will be impacted more than someone living their regular life at home. Especially if that regular life is in a small place.

For route creation have you tried Brouter? It's more customizable than Komoot. For example you can input a custom algorithm setting for distance vs climbing and find your own balance.

By the way I think the default Brouter map theme has excellent separation between major and minor roads. It's very easy to read. Not taking about color aesthetic taste which varies by person, talking about the information clarity.

https://brouter.de/brouter-web/

I’ll have a look at it, but I don’t put that much work into planning. Miles vary.
Not long ago I used both paper maps and GM, but Komoot has left me gobsmacked at the wonderful paths and routes it sends me on.

As to paper maps. So many different colours! But to zoom in or out you have to buy new maps! 😆

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...b94ea7236.jpeg

Last month I took the train to Orléans and rode back to Paris. Nice ride, but nothing to see in between.

It's getting cold now, even snowed here yesterday.

Have you ridden the Eurovelo Route through Paris to Gien?
Everyone seems to have got snow in Europe… except where I am in Sweden

Six weeks on the road using Google for every day and I found nothing wrong with the maps…other than trying to take me off into the woods all the time.

No but maybe later this month I'll do a circle tour, take the train to Orléans, then ride the Loire river to Gien before coming back up to Paris. I rode a bit on the Loire before and it is very nice.

It's warming up again. 19 degrees in Paris tomorrow, wow!

6 weeks...

I just finished a 16 month bike tour around the world a few weeks ago. Slightly longer than yours.

I referred to Google maps early in the tour, but after the theme change I stopped using it completely. I was in Japan when the theme change happened. Checkout what Tokyo looks like now under this new idiocy. You want to talk about an indistinguishable sh*t nest of nearly identical colours and thicknesses? Absolute unusable garbage clustered*ck.


https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...1e4c9135ad.png

Compare with before. Are you able to see the difference?

https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...33e9f08b42.jpg

Not:
Right?

So yours is bigger. Big deal. I still have no problem with the map and don’t find it to be “disgusting”/

Not a lot of difference especially at such a large view. Yes, there are color changes but the major roads are still rather different on the map than the smaller roads. Your map view is also across 40 km (26 miles) and when on the ground at about a 1 to 2 km (or smaller) resolution, the major roads are certainly noticeable enough to avoid them. On the other hand if you are so confused by the map that you end up on a major road, that’s not the map’s problem.

They look close enough that I wouldn’t be bothered by using either version. Frankly, the “new” version is a bit less confusing with less colors to cause confusion. I don’t stare at a map all day long and am more likely to follow my nose when things get down to the more human level on the ground. I’m not a slave to the map.

Errr... ok, whatever you say mister. I think you're living in your own universe over there. :lol::lol::lol:

I see... I see... ;)

Considering you are only one of two people who seem to have a problem with the map, I’d say you living in your little glass universe shouldn’t throw stones.


Apparently not. Is it wrong to actually look where you are going rather than staring at a map all day?

​​​​​​Learn to count, bubbles :lol:


Quit this pedantic drivel wordplay BS.

Yes, actually, to bike tour you do indeed need to use maps. As good of a dog as I'm sure you are, you can't smell your way in and out of Tokyo with your nose. Nor Palembang, or Tbilisi. Ok?

Did you hit these places on your six week tour? Or was the dog merely nosing around his own back yard? Not exactly hard, is it.

I think the format has been changed to reduce data and power consumption on mobile devices. These are problems I had when using Google Maps navigation on my bike, and the main reasons I stopped using it.

Okay, three then, rivet counter.



At least I can put together a clear sentence and thought.

I never said that maps are unnecessary. I said that maps aren’t something that I stare at for every single mile of a tour. If the map says to go up on a multilane highway, I’m not going to follow the map and I’ll find another way around. If the map says to go off up into the hills for 50 miles when there is a nicely flat(ish) road in front of me that will get me to my destination in 35 miles, I’ll take the flatter road. If the map says to take a hiking trail that goes up a cliff, I’ll find a road. All of these are things that electronic maps have tried to do to me over my years of touring.

I’ve traveled across cities and know what a freeway looks like while I riding and tend to avoid those…at least in cities. “Following one’s nose” isn’t about smell. It’s about using you eyes, ears, and other senses in a sensible manner.

And, no, I didn’t do a six week touring around my house. I drove nearly 2000 miles to a place I’d never been before and had no idea of what the roads were or where they were going to take me other than what I had seen on a map. Not that doing a six week tour in an area I know would be a problem. I often ride in areas that I leave near. I hardly use a map for those because I know the territory and, usually, there is no phone service. Mountains make cell phone coverage much more difficult.

Yes. :lol:

""And now "New" Google Maps""

Old or new version, for bike touring google maps is useless! It's fine for hotel search if needed. For route planing and navigation there are much better options out there.

Yan cyccommute knock it off please. take it up over PM.

Many Thanks,
Staff

I used Google Maps a lot on my home computer. But never used it on my phone.

Bike touring, while rolling, I use a GPS for my navigation, phone is turned off. GPS is a general recreation one, not a bike specific one.

Bike touring, route planning ahead of time if I do not have my computer with me, I use GPS (cycle tour routing or car routing, whichever one looks better if different), Komoot, Maps.Me (car routing, avoid toll roads), and of course comparing that to paper map. And I decide which routing looks best.

There have been times that all the electronic options were worse than a rather direct route on the paper map that the electronics were avoiding. I recall one day saving over an hour by taking the straight road on the paper map that all electronics did not want to use. It was a perfectly good low traffic provincial highway with good pavement.

Komoot sometimes gives me crazy options. When that happens I pick a point in the middle on the map to force it to go through that point to make it less crazy.

I have a new phone with a bigger screen, maybe I should try Google Maps on it?

Komoot uses Open Street Maps.

Open Street Maps is the Wikipedia of maps. Anyone can edit it. It's generally pretty good but sometimes there's an error in the map and it throws off routing. The worst is when the map is missing a short section of path and routing sends you on a big detour instead. The next worst is when the map has incomplete or outdated information on the surface type, causing you to end up on poor roads when you wanted pavement.

Last summer I did some experiments between RWGPS and Komoot and ended up using them in different methods:

If I was mapping things out on PC the day before and was in enough populated area - then I liked using RWGPS from my laptop and downloading to my device.

If however, there was an adjustment to plans or it was very sparsely populated then I liked using Komoot from my phone. What I liked was that Komoot had different profiles for Cycling, Road Cycling, Gravel Riding, Backpacking, etc. I wasn't always sure what these settings did but they gave me several alternatives. Also the Road Cycling was less likely to send me on "unknown" roads in sparsely populated states that RWGPS would present as paved.

The other thing I learned was that the cars recording Google Street View in the US seemed to avoid gravel roads so if I asked for a street view and it was missing that also gave me a clue.

I would ride gravel roads where it made sense but also found variations between ones more similar to CO gavel roads I've cycled (*) and others much rougher so it was useful in setting expectations.

(*) When I last lived in CO I printed a large scale map of Weld County and was going through an exercise of riding every road on the county map (~3200 miles total about 20% paved - with good gravel roads, Weld County is approximately the same area as Delaware and Rhode Island combined).

That probably is what happened to me last month driving my vehicle up in Northern Minnesota on a gravel road. I needed to go a straight shot about 25 miles according to the county paper map.

My Garmin Nuvi kept telling me to instead do a 200 plus mile circuitous route instead. Photo below:

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...1d945a1462.jpg

I also had my general recreation GPS that I use for camping and bike touring. I turned that on and put in my destination into it. It also told me to drive a couple hundred extra miles when I set it for car routing. I was driving an SUV, but I often set that GPS for tour cycling, so I just did that to see what would happen. When set for tour cycle routing, it followed the county road perfectly. (Sorry, no photo.)

So, the GPS map must have had a short section of missing road that car routing would not accept, but bicycle routing would accept.

My handheld GPS was using Open Streets maps for routing. My Garmin Nuvi for my vehicle was using whatever Garmin uses for their map updates, I had updated the Nuvi maps a few months before.

Your comment is why I said not to be a slave to the electronic map. All maps…all maps…have problems and mistakes. Google maps is convenient but the user has to use their discretion as well. Here in Colorado we have had too many examples of people following Google maps into situations where they can’t back up and can’t go forward. They should have made the decision to turn around far sooner. Sometimes it’s better to look at the road in front of you and ignore then map on the phone that is insisting that you go its way. What the map looks like on the screen is less important than what the road in front of you looks like.

Yep, a backup is always nice. That's why I bring at least two phones with downloaded maps when I'm really out there. For tricky unnamed road/trail sections I'll do a cue sheet with each turn also showing the approximate bearing of the road I'm turning onto so I have a good idea it's the road/trail I want

I get lost all the time 😆 Times have changed and I use Komoot and Google Maps nowadays but still have a paper map and compass. Still I get lost as I daydream too much and end up asking locals to point me in the right direction.

I‘m amazed at how much planning some of you guys do ✌️

Just reminiscing, but on my first long tour from Sweden to Spain in 1985, the only map I had was a Michelin map of Europe 1: 3 000 000 🤣
I got there on my five speed bike with plastic pedals and barefoot all the way.

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...3a119c004.jpeg

I rode Paris to Gien on your suggestion. I'm in Gien now waiting for the train back. It's 2 degrees so we gave up on the ride to Orléans.

The Loire at Gien:
https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...160f8b214b.jpg

^^^ great photo! 👍