Strava Heat Map
Strava colors in roads based on 2 years of uploaded ride GPS recordings. (700 million miles per year, just in the US!)
SW Ohio map click the bicycle icon, and click Labels to show street and town names.
Cities have way more activity, so they show bright white on a zoomed out view. As you zoom in, it rebalances the colors to match local popularity.
Some roads may be gravel or may be steep. And some are just the best way out of town, not necessarily the nicest road.
It's biggest help for me is to route around roads that cyclists avoid. If some roads nearby have lots of activity, and the one road is dim, then cyclists are avoiding it.
Route Builder
(You need a free strava login to use this.)
Strava Route Builder uses the heat map data to choose a route. It will go out of the way to pick the most popular roads. I use it with the heat map colors turned on in the sidebar settings, and often drag the suggested route to different good roads.
It is way better than Google Maps bicycling option, which just picks the most direct route, often on quite busy main roads. (perhaps they've improved it in the last year or so, but when I tested it, it was pretty bad at routing. Good for a quick check of mileage, though.)
For long days, I need water and food stops, and avoiding too many very steep hills. It won't do that automatically, of course. It's "avoid hills" button takes it to the extreme, really avoiding any amount of hills, and picking less optimal roads.
Columbus-Madison
PM me for more details.
You should ride through Cincinnati. Cincinnati to Madison is hilly, so do longer mileage the first day. meeting in Dayton? I'd just ride the Xenia to Dayton trail out and back.
You can likely save some miles by heading toward Hamilton OH instead of Cincinnati.
But just about all the good routes will be longer than 200 miles. A good route from Cincinnati to Madison is about 80 miles, and hilly. Doing the whole ride in two days will be hard.
testing Route Builder:
I just clicked the end points, and it made a reasonable route.
Bike trails to Cincinnati, then through KY to Madison. The route would need some adjustments to skip some steeper hills and have a water stop, which are fairly rare in rural KY.
route builder screen shots:
Just the end points:
Dragging KY section over to Lawrenceburg IN.
It takes the best route to Lawrenceburg, Route 8 along the river, to the nice Anderson Ferry crossing, then along Hillside Ave instead of busy Rt 50
There's alternate routes out of Aurora IN. the river road is kind of busy. The interior roads can be hilly with steeper climbs, but very nice to ride, smooth and quiet.
