Another idea while working on my journey: if the routing engine could ensure the route between two points on a given side of the border stays at all time on the same side, that would be nice haha

But I guess this is more arguable and more complicated than my initial request :D

Good question!

Is it the job of cycle.travel to show national borders? 

I thought I'd check:

https://cycle.travel/map/journey/877208

Is it the job of cycle.travel to show national borders? 

Well, showing hazards seem something essential to me.

Any ideas what you would like to see, maybe troop of little policeman strolling along the border?

Your sarcasm is not necessary. Maybe my description of the issue is not clear, so I'll add some images showing the issue (using your journey).

Zoomed out, it's ok (border appears at about km 160):

but when I zoom in, the border (shown as a line) completely disappear:

so when creating a journey going close to the border, I keep having to zoom in/zoom out (to ensure I'm not crossing the border accidentally) which is tedious.

Ken,

Actually yes. Most maps show national borders like they show rivers, cities and roads. No need for sarcasm.

I’ll have a look at the cartography (though I can’t promise it’ll be immediate as I tend to update that less often than the routing).

The routing does apply a penalty for crossing a border to stop that sort of weaving. (In the US, that is – in Europe it’s not generally an issue.) I’ll look at whether to crank it up a bit more, but there is a specific problem that can only really be fixed in the OSM data: border crossing posts usually have one-way roads/lanes in each direction, and so the router sometimes figures out that you can avoid the penalty by pushing your bike against the traffic in the other direction. In reality you wouldn’t be allowed to do this, of course, but c.t doesn’t know that unless it’s expressly tagged in OSM with oneway:foot=yes !

As a possible help, you might try toggling from the cycle.travel base map to OpenStreetMap or OSM German Style, both of which seem to show borders more distinctly. These are accessed via the map layer icon (a stack of diamond shapes) near the top right of the screen.

As an example, the North Dakota-Manitoba border appears as this on the default C.T map. The line of red dots hugging the border is the Trans Canada Trail, but the border line is invisible.

Selecting OpenStreetMap gives you this:

And OSM German Style gives this, again with a clear border:

Chris