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Cafe and pub rides

20 Feb 2022
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Having seen Richards presentation at the Cycle Touring Festival I was interested to use this website to find new / different cycle routes in my locality and further afield. What I thought would be particularly useful was the cafe and pub ride. Putting in my location I was presented with an array of locations, repeating the process similar locations were presented. The locations were essentially all north of my location, trying other locations dotted around the country I found the same issue, all the cafes and pubs were to the north of the location defined. I feel this is a problem as it excludes half of the potential venues around a location. Is this a facet of the mapping or can this be resolved to provide venues equally distributed around a location. Thanks.

Comments

Sun 20 Feb 2022, 11:12

I thought that I would test this facility so put in Cowes on the Isle of Wight. A location which is on the north coast of the island and all cafes and pubs will be south. So pressing the go button I was somewhat surprised to find all the routes took me on two ferries to venues somewhere in Hampshire. There seems to be an issue with the mapping which disregards cafes and pubs on the Isle of Wight.

Sun 20 Feb 2022, 17:17

That is a really interesting issue – thank you for spotting it!

What seems to be happening is that when cycle.travel asks its mapping database for (say) “the first 200 cafes at around 40km from here”, it’s returning them, for some reason of its own, in north-to-south order. So we never get to the southerly ones because the 200 has filled up with northerly ones first.

If you try somewhere really out-of-the-way (e.g. Mallaig), or only ask for a small radius, it finds southerly ones fine.

As yet I’m not sure how I’m going to fix this! But I’ll try and work it out.

Sun 20 Feb 2022, 17:39

Fixed it – I think! Try putting in Cowes now and see how you get on.

Sun 20 Feb 2022, 22:50

Richard, sorry to have upset your Sunday. I have tried Cowes and Thurso which both have shown venues to the south. Thanks.

Thu 3 Mar 2022, 10:57

This is potentially a wonderful feature. When I ask for a cafe ride from Chester, I notice that it misses most, if not all, of the popular cycling cafes in the area. I wonder if there is a source data issue that is not promoting these to the fore?

Fri 4 Mar 2022, 07:13

How does one access this functionality please? Probably obvious, however I'm not seeing it.

Fri 4 Mar 2022, 12:47
How does one access this functionality please? Probably obvious, however I'm not seeing it.

If you go to the homepage and click on "starting from" then a green box appears which had the cafe/pub ride options. It definitely could be more obvious IMO, as I forgot where it was recently until I started a route from the homepage.

Mon 7 Mar 2022, 16:12

Thanks for that Michael.