Just for fun, I asked for a route between two points I ride frequently close to where I live in Texas to see what would come up, but disappointingly, the route offered was along the busiest most horrible route for cycling rather than the quiet back roads we all love. The suggested route would be great for a motorist being the most direct, fastest, but it is clear work needs to be done to correct this anomaly.
Any ideas how I might go about helping to revise this for future cyclists?
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Can you say what the route was? Either the start/end point or post a link to the saved route.
I saved the route on this site, but cannot find a reference to it so here are the beginning and end points: Sealy, Texas to Fayetteville, Texas. You can find it in my account: Ken Jessett
For comparison, I have plotted the better route which is: https://ridewithgps.com/routes/49100692. This route goes over 8 1/2 miles of busy roads compared with all of the cycle.travel route being on busy roads.
I am an Audax rider and I have thousands of miles of routes I have designed on RWGPS and as far as I know, no one over here uses OSM.
Richard, you presumably you will know, is there much call for cycle.travel routes in the states to make it worthwhile for users to get in there and adjust?
I thought this was interesting: https://www.adventurecycling.org/routes-and-maps/map-updates-and-corrections/
I am planning to stage a cross country race using some of Adventure's network and was curious how they maintain the routes. It appears they use the same user input process that OSM does.
Ah, the issue there is the perennial one with OSM data in the rural US!
Due to the way in which OSM data was first seeded in the States, it isn’t reliable for surface information. Essentially, there are a lot (thousands upon thousands) of roads in the rural US which are simply tagged in OSM as “residential road”. In Europe this means a paved road unless otherwise stated, but in the rural US it’s not safe to make this assumption – indeed, it’s not even safe to assume it’s a rideable road at all.
cycle.travel takes a deliberately conservative approach with these roads. You’ll see they’re marked with a faint grey dashed line, and c.t will try to avoid routing over them if at all possible. That’s because I don’t want to route people over an impassable road, through a river or across private land.
Most other route-planners which use OSM (i.e. everything apart from Google and Apple) take the data at face value and will happily route you along these roads. On average I think c.t’s approach is better, but it does mean that sometimes it misses a good route.
The fix is to add surface information in OSM. If it’s a paved road, mark it as paved in OSM; or if it’s gravel or dirt, mark it accordingly. c.t can then make an informed decision. I’ve marked countless roads as paved over the last few years, reviewing them from aerial imagery, and it really does make a difference to the quality of routing.
Indeed, gravel routes are becoming very popular around here with many Audax gravel brevets being added as are routes created by recreational riders. The advantage being they avoid the major roads - of which even once minor roads are now being used by heavy vehicles as this part of Texas is rapidly being concreted over.
I will say though I never ride gravel, I just don't have the tyres for it, all my routes, including the RWGPS one I just showed, are on paved surfaces.