Hello there,
Thanks very much for the work on this great site.
I use it extensively to plan my first bike trips.
I do have a question however about the route planner, especially regarding "bike road" or relations tagged with route=bicycle within OSM. For instance, I plan on riding on the EuroVelo 4; https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/5445857.
On the cycle.travel map, such "bike road" are displayed, it even feel as the map emphasizes it which makes sense; as shown here: https://framapic.org/nNo8y7fYI8Uc/DFShfPWn9N8M.png.
I would like to route from one town to another which are both on this "bike road", but if I do, with the default settings the route planner does not seem to take the existence of this "bike road" into account, even with the help of a waypoint; see https://framapic.org/l6CQfvOmUFie/IifZAjpqSWKY.png.
The result is that I have to make a lot of waypoints to make the planned route use the "bike road", as shown here: https://framapic.org/CA5Kx6FhNfbj/8YEwb1pVKvUV.png.
So I wanted to know if there was a way to hint the route engine to prefer such "bike roads"?
Paved-only option didn't help.
It feels like what I want to do with this tool is kind of what it is made for because this project is focused on cycle route planning, and it seems reasonable to me that following established, bicycle dedicated itineraries is a common things to do among people who bike travel.
Thank you very much for any reply,
Anthony.
Comments
Good question. cycle.travel does prefer EuroVelo (and other such signposted) routes but only up to a point. Because EV4 is very indirect, cycle.travel will often prefer a more direct route on other cycleways or quiet roads.
In the short term I’ll be expanding the route library so that you can choose EV4 (or whatever) and have all the waypoints set for you automatically. In the longer term a “follow routes” option would be great, but it’s quite difficult with the fast route-planning algorithm cycle.travel uses – not least because it would be very susceptible to accidental breaks in the OSM route relations. I’ll give it some thought though.