The choice of 'Any', 'Paved' or 'Gravel' is helpful to a point. 'Paved' is useful in that Google street map helps me to view the suggested route to decide on places to visit and places to avoid. The obvious downside cannot detect the volume and speed of motor vehicles. 'Gravel' is useful despite that drawback of not always being pre-viewable. On occasions the 'Gravel' route has taken me along pathways that are barely passable due to overgrown vegetation or debris that heightens the risk of punctures. Would the opportunity to highlight the quality of gravel paths help to inform future travellers what is unsuitable for a road bike or will be ideal for a mountain bike? if so I wonder if the gravel option could be coded in some way to help the decision making process of riders and the types of bikes the ride.Any thoughts?
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All good points! On A roads and (many) B roads, cycle.travel does take traffic volume into account, so it’ll generally try to steer you away from the busiest.
Gravel routing is basically only as good as the OpenStreetMap data which cycle.travel uses as its source dataset. Often, in OSM, paths are just marked as “bridleway” or “track” without any record of surface quality. cycle.travel will try to make an informed guess but often there’s very little to go on.
So absolutely yes – you can help the decision-making process and the way to do that is by fixing the information in OSM. If there’s a path that isn’t suitable, you can edit OSM to set the surface or tracktype values. cycle.travel takes an update from OSM about once a month, so when this next rolls around, the routing will avoid the worst paths and prefer the better ones – in theory at least!
Richard, or anyone,
Ate there any tutorials video or text to help the technologically challenged understand and contribute?
Many thanks
I love the Gravel option! Sometimes it is a path across a farmer's field!