njkayaker

Some tourers might want heart rate (fewer of them are likely interested in VO2 and lactate).

This is provided by any GPS device (with a map). There are a few smartphone apps that will do it, also.

This is harder since different people have rather different opinions about what "bicycle friendly" means. There's also a question about how this information is acquired. Garmin (and others) have a "heat map" that shows how popular particular routes are. Each company has their own database for this. The bigger the user population is, the better this information is. Google makes its own attempt at cycle routing but I don't know how generally good it works.

The issue here is how this information is collected and kept up-to-date. For commercial concerns (like places to eat and sleep), Google is going to be hard to beat for completeness and being up-to-date.

Another issue is clutter on a small screen. You only need places-to-sleep information at the end of the day and places-to-eat about 3 times a day. It might not be that useful to highlight all of them. Also, people are usually going to want more detail about these places (which means highlighting them isn't going to be enough).

Things like "places to pee" (or even to get water) are going to be much less reliable since there's no commercial incentive to collect that information.

If you have a smartphone and a connection to cellular network (which one won't always have), then the smartphone is going to be the best choice for searching for commercial concerns.

If you are touring, you can't expect to always have a connection to a cellular network. This means you should have maps installed on your device (whether that device is a dedicated GPS, a smartphone, or even both).

The typical source (now-a-days) for these maps is Openstreetmap (OSM), since it's free. These maps are generally good for navigation but are not going to be that reliable/complete for commercial information. (In some places, the commercial stuff on OSM might be very good but it won't be everywhere.)

(People used to buy maps from Garmin to use on their Garmin devices. But, since the updates weren't free, people just kept using the old maps they bought first.)

Steve B.

NJ has this correct.

One issue is that there's no commercial incentive to keep the free on-line OSM maps up to date, thus what we use on a smartphone or GPS cycling device sometimes has errors that don't get immediately fixed, not to mention not knowing about construction, detours, etc...

I was recently using the Hammerhead on-line route creation map and found it would not route me on certain road. I did a support question with HH who told me it's maybe an error on the OSM maps. Turned out RWGPS was showing the same error, they too use OSM. When I logged in to the OSM website to report an error, I was able to correctly create a route on the road in question, so seems like OSM had possibly discovered and fixed the error, but neither RWGPS nor HH have picked up the corrections. So it goes in the online mapping world.

njkayaker

The OSM dataset is huge and takes some time to use the data to compile maps.

The update schedule for some of the providers of Garmin compatible maps is about 2 weeks.

Garmin's update schedule is about every 6 months.

I doubt many people update their copy of the OSM data more frequently than 2 weeks.

If I find issues, I update OSM myself.

mibike

RideWithGPS will let you use other maps including Google. If you find an error in an area you can switch maps when planing a route there,

I also fix any errors I find in OSM myself.

Steve B.

I went looking to see if the error existed in OSM. It didnt. Thus nothing to fix. When I checked this today in RWGPS, there was no issue. When I try this tonight in HH I discover that if I zoom way in on the map and drop a lot of control points, I can route onto the roads I desire. Not sure whose issue this is, HH or OSM

mibike

Most likely with it being OK in OSM and RWGPS it's just a mater of HH not updating yet. I don't know how often HH updates from OSM but I would check it now and then.

Steve B.

My thought as well. And there is a work-around

mwatt65 

I ended up with a Garmin Edge 530, on sale for $249 might of preferred a larger screen for my old eyes. Seems to do a whole lot more than I'll ever need.