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I want to stay on a specific street.

3 Aug 2022
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Why do I have to spend so much time trying to stay on a specific street? I don't care for most of the neighborhood streets that the map routes me through. Bad dog owners, crime, I just want to go straight, etc... I want the main streets, many of which have a bike lane, yet the map routes through crappy neighborhoods instead. I'm new, so maybe there's an option I can't find. Halp please.

Comments

Wed 3 Aug 2022, 17:21

cycle.travel is mostly geared to finding quieter routes rather than big busy roads. But it might be making the wrong call where you’re looking (or maybe it doesn’t know about the bike lanes) – anywhere in particular you’ve found this happening?

Thu 4 Aug 2022, 01:06

@Richard Fairhurst . In Oklahoma there are a lot of dedicated bike lanes that the map here jumps around and avoids. OSMAnd+ app also has this behavior. It makes it hard to plan a route and share it with people new to the area. Even the paid apps do this, so it's not a solitary problem with cycle.travel. A lot of these little detours though, they're not in great areas and in a few cases, could be dangerous (dogs/crime). 

Thu 4 Aug 2022, 09:34

My understanding is that a lot of the mapping apps use the same underlying mapping data, only the logarithms used are different. If cyclepaths aren't in the underlying data then there is little that we can do, although openstreetmaps can be edited by "normal" folks. So that's an option.

Osmand does have the option to avoid highlighted streets although it's bike routing is inferior, in general, to CycleTravel.

If you use the same exit and entry routes from your home, for example, you could consider making a template of your preferred route and then planning anything else from the start or end point of that.

I used to use the "suggest a route" option with great success but it really came into its own when I selected a start point a few Kms away from my house. 

Thu 4 Aug 2022, 17:17

You might well be right Hobbes – if OSMAnd has the same problem, it could be that the bike lanes just aren’t recorded in the underlying map data (OpenStreetMap, which both cycle.travel and OSMAnd use).

Roy – would you be able to say a street name and city where this is happening, so I can take a look?

Unfortunately there isn’t really any publicly available data of dangerous areas that cycle.travel could use to inform its choices. It’s an interesting idea though.

Sun 7 Aug 2022, 04:08

Sorry it took me awhile to get back here. Hobbes is right about the underlying data and "plan my route". You get the same, or similar results with both when using the same maps.

Richard, The streets most commonly getting rerouted with good bike paths being avoided... Walker, Western and NW 19th and 16th (last 2 are bike routes, not a designated lane, but it's common routes that people expect bike traffic) in Oklahoma City.