Tourist mode

Dear Richard Fairhurst

Thank you for your work on Cycle.Travel. Since I first heard you and Jack talking about it on the Bike Show it has become my main tool for navigation. A labour of love, clearly!

Although I am now largely retired I am a supporter. The iOS app does not recognise this: any suggestions?

I would like to propose a new 'mode' for finding routes: tourist. Why? I recently used the Journey Planner to find my way out of Twickenham to Blackwater, near Camberley: the first stage of my journey here to Burgundy. The planner did a great job of keeping me away from busy roads. But the cycle lanes and pedestrian crossings added at least an hour to my journey and the lumpy surfaces and constant stop-start on a loaded touring bike was exhausting. Although I enjoyed discovering Cumberland Park, by the time I reached my destination I was wondering if I would have done better simply to bash down the A30.

A tourist mode would assume the rider can traverse even a busy roundabout. It would aim for steady progress, avoid steep climbs; perhaps even descents. In England it would avoid the majority of what highway authorities please to dub cycleways, especially shared-use footways. This seems a difficult criterion to meet, because cycleways made to the standards now being insisted upon by Active Travel England are a quite different matter. (I'll consult Danny Williams about this, see if he has any ideas.)

All other factors being equal, tourist mode would prefer minor roads to short cycleways and would navigate through intersections and roundabouts rather than fiddle with controlled crossings and stop-start.

Navigating in France has been a pleasure. I was puzzled that the planner could not find a paved route from St Malo to my destination in Le Perche. Switching surfaces to Any quickly found the EV4 with its voies vertes. Perhaps you could consider categorising the voies vertes as paved; I have found them about as well surfaced as the minor roads.

Congratulations on generating a decent pronunciation of road names here! When feeling mischievous I have switched for short periods to using Google Maps to see if I can recognise road names from its mangled pronunciation.

Could you use some coding assistance? I might be able to contribute more in code than I can these days in money.

Cordialement

Stephen Taylor

Bourbon-Lancy, Burgundy