
An ingenious vintage German cycle map (2014) - Tomte
http://blog.systemed.net/post/10
======
mohn
I'm a big fan of this sort of everyday practical data visualization! To anyone
who hasn't already seen this feature: when you select walking or biking
directions on Google Maps, it renders a line in the sidebar to show you
elevation change over the route. You can mouse over positions on that line,
(or over the route line on the map) and it will render an indicator on the
other line.

In this example, the elevation trace reveals a very steep section on Gregory
Canyon Rd, between Baseline Rd and Flagstaff Rd:

[https://i.imgur.com/NWiRmdK.png](https://i.imgur.com/NWiRmdK.png)

~~~
adimitrov
Meh. Not to be a debbie downer, but that's the most basic courtesy you can
offer to cyclists, and even that isn't telling half the story. In central
Europe anyway, Google Maps is unusable for creating cycling tracks or
directions.

There are much better alternatives, such as komoot or Strava or GPSies (I'm
not affiliated.)

As important as (and sometimes more important than) the profile in a section
is the _gradient_. The Google map doesn't tell me if there's going to be a 10%
or 20% piece, and I can't glean it from the curve, because depending on the
length of the track, the relations change.

Additionally, it's very important to know what kind of road you're on, and
what kind of surface that road has. The thing only Google could do here, and
doesn't, is to tell me how busy (with cars) the roads are and offer me a way
around busy roads. Komoot at least shows me the type of road or street and its
surface.

See this: [https://imgur.com/a/j20XOmi](https://imgur.com/a/j20XOmi) (from
komoot.)

the hill in the middle looks scary, but the line along its ridge tells me the
gradient isn't steep. Yellow is 8% (it tells you on hover). It tells me what
percentage (and where) the road is a bike road, or larger road, etc.

Strava on the other hand has heat maps:
[https://www.strava.com/heatmap](https://www.strava.com/heatmap) which tell
you where local cyclists like to go. One caveat is that it shows you where
local _road cyclists_ and _mountain bikers_ like to go. Those folks can have
vastly different understanding of what viable road conditions are from each
other, and from you.

Unfortunately, planning cycling tracks is still a chore, and getting it wrong
can be dangerous or at least unpleasant. The market is there, but it's nowhere
near as huge as for cars.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
(I'm the author of the 2014 article posted here - really pleasant surprise to
see it surface on HN.)

Fully agree with your comments. It's not just Google that can tell you about
busy roads, though - in some countries that's available as open data.

I run [https://cycle.travel/map](https://cycle.travel/map) , which uses open
traffic data (in the US, UK and a couple of other places) to influence its
OpenStreetMap-based bike routing. So, for example, in the Home Counties
(broadly the London commuter belt) the A-class roads are generally busy and
unrideable, whereas A-class roads in the Scottish Highlands are often (not
always) beautifully quiet. cycle.travel will happily route along the latter
but not the former.

The Strava approach is interesting, but Strava users are biased towards
athletic cyclists who generally have a higher tolerance for busy roads. For
tourers and other leisure riders I'm less convinced that the presence of other
cyclists is a good signifier of pleasant cycling. (In London, for example,
Strava shows the Euston Road as a busy cycling thoroughfare, which I'd never
dream of riding.)

~~~
adimitrov
Thanks for chiming in! cycle.travel/map is really good! I like how responsive
the interface is, and its routing algorithm seems on par with other ones I've
tried. Do you take into account traffic info for Germany? I couldn't find good
open sources for that.

Yeah, Strava tends to overestimate the rideability of bigger roads. Keep in
mind that a lot of groups use Strava, and it's easier to ride a busy road when
you're in a group. In Germany, for example, you even have a different legal
status on the road. I would love it if I could somehow filter the global
Strava data, but they don't make their data available; not that I would expect
them to.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
No, I've not found national traffic data for Germany, unfortunately. I think
it exists for one or two areas (NRW maybe?) but certainly not nationally, and
the proprietary sources tend to be prohibitively expensive. I'm intrigued as
to whether it might be possible to count cars in imagery as a possible
alternative...

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bsimpson
I'm curious to see an SF version, though I wonder how you would sufficiently
render such a dense and hilly city in this perspective.

~~~
schoen
There's a widely-available "San Francisco Bike Map and Walking Guide"

[http://www.rufusguides.com/sanfran.html](http://www.rufusguides.com/sanfran.html)

and SFBC has a (large!) vector PDF version on their site

[https://www.sfbike.org/download/map.pdf](https://www.sfbike.org/download/map.pdf)

This map uses shading to indicate how steep the gradient of each individual
city block is, but interestingly the shading doesn't show the _direction_ of
that gradient, so you don't immediately know whether it will be uphill or
downhill. But the map also includes contour lines, so if you look closely, you
can figure it out from the contours even if you're unfamiliar with the
neighborhood.

On the other hand, if you're generally familiar with the neighborhood, the
shading might be helpful by itself because you might have an intuition about
when you're going to be going uphill and when you're going to be going
downhill.

I agree that replicating the cool visualization method from the linked article
might be tricky in San Francisco for the exact reasons you mention.

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wirrbel
I have family living in a vilage shown in the snapshot of the map. It's deep
black forest so, while I think displaying the steepness is a neat idea, there,
you just know that over the mountain is steep, and if you want to avoid it,
you stay in the valley :)

~~~
heckerhut
hehe. I’m from there too.

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black_puppydog
ohhhhh.... I'd want that in my osmand for the biking and hiking modes... :)

~~~
lucb1e
OsmAnd has something that's similar:
[https://snag.gy/z5l4WZ.jpg](https://snag.gy/z5l4WZ.jpg)

Steps to reproduce:

1\. Calculate a route

2\. Click the blue navigation icon at the bottom (it should show the from, to,
car/cycling/walking, distance, settings button, etc.)

3\. Press on the distance or time.

Optionally, see the "Analyse on map" button.

~~~
black_puppydog
Yes, I love that feature! I found out about it some weeks ago, on the very
last leg of a brutal two day hike where I could really have used it XD

