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
Comments
Unfortunately, Stephen, one man's "tourist mode" is another man's hell. :-) A Dutch tourist, used to separate bike lanes on roundabouts going in one direction might very well prefer to avoid roundabouts in the opposite direction, mixing with traffic on their holidays.
There's a brief discussion and some tips here from last week https://cycle.travel/forum/thread/5029
I do wonder how much infrastructure (as opposed to planner) issues are the root cause of your problems, given your contrasting experiences in the UK and France? I recall many, many A shaped barriers being a real pain on dedicated cycle paths when I crossed the UK.
As for the surfaces of the VVs, CycleTravel takes its data from OpenStreetMaps and their data is open to all to be changed, added to and supplemented. If you have a background in tech you may be more suited to it than the likes of I, still struggling and afraid to mess everything up and have cyclists riding off cliffs! :-)
There are also a lot of "prepared" routes, available under "Route Guides" or the full list is at the bottom of this page: https://cycle.travel/routes CT makes it very easy to take these and shorten or adapt them to our own needs.
Hope this helps
Finding a good route out of London in any direction is challenging, but especially heading west – there simply aren’t many good options, especially if you discount the (partly unpaved) Grand Union towpath, and cycle.travel has to do the best it can. I have to admit my usual answer is “take the train out past the suburbs”!
Unfortunately adding any more routing modes isn’t viable at the moment – each one effectively requires renting a new server (or replacing an existing one with one with more RAM) and that costs a lot of money.
I would quite like the existing paved-only mode to have a slight preference for more direct routes, which I think is pretty much what you’re asking. It’s not technically easy right now and also has a few server implications, but it is a long-term aspiration. (At present the paved-only mode is simply the standard mode with unpaved paths knocked out; it doesn’t have any different weightings for a given paved road/path. Contrast with the gravel mode which does have different weightings.)
It would be lovely if Active Travel England could take on the cause of creating good routes out of London, perhaps by upgrading some of the existing shared-use paths beside roads to not have so many fiddly crossings, bus stops on pavements, and bumpy surfaces. One day…