francoisnewtown

Hello,

I like to map the entire route of a trip before I leave. I tried Openrunner and Komoot. The advantage of Komoot is that it follows itself the roads on the map. But after 200 or 300km (because my trips average around 500km in total), the detours and loops start to get all crooked on the map. I have just given up on entering the tour of Prince Edward Island (Canada) because it became impossible to follow the route suggested by the app. It was going crazy! I think that this app is not made for long trips of several days, but rather for trips of one day maximum.

Question: which app do you use to plan your trips of several days on maps??

Thank you.

François Villeneuve
Rimouski, Québec, Canada

Tourist in MSN

Before I go on a trip, I put a generalized route into a map on Mapsource on my home computer. Mapsource is an older Garmin program that is no longer supported by Garmin, but it still functions pretty well.

I usually use Komoot for distances that I would travel for a day or two just to see how that compares to what my Garmin GPS Model 64 suggests. In my Garmin I have a choice of method, I usually pick Tour Cycling and Minimize Elevation. Sometimes I check that against the route suggested for car routing on Maps.Me which is an Android app on my phone. And when all those routes look stupid, I look at the paper map and use that.

In other words, I use several options, and I do not rely on any single one for exclusive use. All of the electronic routing systems seem to favor state or provincial roads over local roads, but sometimes I see local roads on the paper map that make more sense and are more direct.

And, I often will change the route for local conditions. I rode PEI in June and July 2019, I did not plan to stop at Charlottetown, but the forecast had five consecutive days of rain, so I decided to check into the Hostel there for three nights to sit out the worst of the rain, thus all of my prior routing plans on PEI were discarded. I also often rode the trail system when it was convenient. For example, I rode on the Confederation Trail for almost the entire way from Charlottetown to the Confederation Bridge.

My route from Halifax to Halifax is on the attached map, the stops with numbers, those numbers represent the date of the first night I stayed at each location. To make that map I put my GPS data from my trip into Google Earth and took a screen shot of it.



If you are not aware of this yet, they do not let you ride a bike across the Confederation Bridge. From PEI to New Brunswick was $9 CAD in 2019. I took the Ferry to PEI, the trip to PEI is free. Based on their price list, I suspected that they might want to charge me for each pannier, but they did not. The $9 cyclist fee was all they asked for.



They had a trailer to pull behind the shuttle van for bikes. I thought that they were doing a very good job to make sure my bike made the trip safely.



I recommend the fish and chips.



Have a great trip.

indyfabz

I had never heard of Komoots until I saw a recent post in a regional forum. The route map included a segment on a long causeway across a bay in NJ that was demolished many years ago. Left me scratching my head as to why its data could be so inaccurate.

debade

My wife does the routing using RidewithGPS. I load them on my garmin in the daily segments. Works for us.

gauvins

To plan, on a computer, Google maps at first and then, BRouter.

Once the route planning is done, compute and save waypoints on Locus Pro (Android) using bRouter as an add on. It is also possible to design a route on the computer and export/import waypoints to a phone.

Under way, navigate cities using my phone mounted on handlebars. When navigating on roads, I push routes from my phone to a fitness watch (F5) using Locus out.

This system works for months-long trips and hundreds of waypoints.

njkayaker

Ridewithgps should be able to do multiday trips.

It might make navigation easier or more reliable if you break a long trip up.

If you are planning overnights at specific places, they are natural places to break the track up.

mev

I don't plan down to turn by turn type directions. Instead, prior to departure, I'll have a rough plan in mind perhaps exploring with Google maps.

Now it is going to vary some by location and density of the road network. In large parts of western Canada or the US, there really aren't many road choices after that, so I'll roughly follow those routes. If I get local information e.g. road closures/construction then I may adjust further. The other spot that can get tricky is entry/exit into large cities. Here I'll do a combination of looking on "strava heat map" a previous evening to find routes taken by local cyclists and also sometimes having a cell phone give me bicycle directions to prescribed waypoints I've figured in advance.

Steve B.

I’ve used RWGPS to create a track/route of the 1999 Bicycle Tour of Colorado. It had no issues with the 489 miles. If I were doing this as a navigable route I would break it down to daily segments as separate routes each day.

indyfabz

I’ve mapped longer (by at least 200 miles) routes with no problem.

mev

My guess is distance isn't the right metric to use here. Rather, I suspect number of turns or other complexity makes more sense.

I've done BTC twice and Ride the Rockies four times. Most of those routes are quite straightforward with not many turns (except for occasional things at start/end of the day to get exactly to your stopping point). So while they might be longer distance you might also be on the same road 10, 20, 40 miles before turning.

I also don't understand why the OP ran into issues - but how many turns and changes in direction are we talking about here?

As an aside, first mapping app I used was this one: https://artsandculture.google.com/as...8rVDIZSg?hl=en This was for a 1992 trip across the USA so an earlier version than the 1993 edition shown in the photo. I used it somewhat like I still use these mapping applications: (a) get the rough parameters for routes and things like overall distances (b) find tune on the way with maps and update as I go along.

Steve B.

Agree, BTC was not a ride where TBT would have any application. It’s navigating thru a moderate town/city to get to the other side, a campground, motel, etc... where a true test of usability would take place. I was just curious if RWGPS could generate a route over the distance. It did.

indyfabz

RWGPS had no problem with my 500+ mile route from St. Albans, VT to Philly, which had plenty of turns.

HobbesOnTour

I see that no-one has mentioned https://cycle.travel/
Not an app, but a website.
I've plotted routes of well over 1000 km on it.
Functionality for accommodation is optimal in Europe, but I found its routes superior (and safer!) to Komoot in the U.S. although it's address search function was weaker (or perhaps that was my lack of experience witn US addresses).
Instant access to Google Street view is very handy in tbe planning stages.

Definitely worth investigating.

njkayaker

RWGPS also provides Street View (and satellite views).

njkayaker

Did you talk to Komoot?

There shouldn't be any problem calculating routes of 500 km on a server.

ChrisWagner

Wiki makes available a handy Comparison of bicycle route planning websites. Note the devil is in the details to get any one app to perform (submit) to your needs.