Old 07-19-20, 07:09 PM
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dwmckee
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Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: Pittsburgh, PA
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Bikes: Co-Motion Cappuccino Tandem,'88 Bob Jackson Touring, Co-Motion Cascadia Touring, Open U.P., Ritchie Titanium Breakaway, Frances Cycles SmallHaul cargo bike. Those are the permanent ones; others wander in and out of the stable occasionally as well.

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I deal with this all of the time in creating gravel routes. It probably is nearly impossible to keep current all of these roads in every state, even if you are Google. I always check routes with at least 3 different sources when I create it and then the first ride I invite a few adventurous friends and let them know it is a scouting ride and we may make a lot of detours and bypasses before we finish. That adds to the fun. I can have several iterations before I finalize and make it a bigger large group ride out of it.. I have over 1,000 miles of gravel routes in PA mapped thsi way. Part of my verification is to use google maps satellite view to conform (when I can) if a road still exists, or if it is still gravel. I have learned how to often tell if it is gravel by the road color, absence of a ceter line and by lookig at the intersections. Regardless still have to scout them first before finalizing. Sometimes I even find new roads that are not on the map that I use too and I manually create a road in RWGPS there and put comments in for riders to hear.

Innacurate road locations, inaccurate road names, existence of roads, etc. is just part of making routes. Combined from the last two routes I created I had to deal with a total of 5 completely missing bridges, two roads closed by landslides, one road completely gone and one overgrown to the point of being impassible, and one great road that was not on any of the map options.

If you get this all figured out for a route and make it so people can reliably ride without worrying about these issues (and you navigate around or warn about untied dogs, etc.) then your routes become the go-to sources for people to trust and ride.

I do not make any of my routes public until I hae them fullt scouted out.
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