I'm in the process of planning a 6-8 day bike tour and wanting to keep it on gravel roads as much as possible. I've done about 150 days of bike touring in the past on paved roads, and I'm done rolling the dice with my life now that apps are so addictive that drivers can't help scrolling while operating a moving vehicle.
Gravelmaps has been a huge help, so has google maps using street view to check for gravel or if necessary the width of the shoulder. Even on side roads that haven't been streetview'd you can still check it at intersections to see.
The planning is VERY time consuming though, lots of permutations of routes to get between 2 points when the goal is to stay off paved surfaces each with various tradeoffs. It would be VERY cool if gravelmap let you input a start and end point and gave you a best route suggestion. Or even if google let you select gravel only.
https://bikerouter.de/ is running brouter-web and has some gravel routing profiles installed. The FFMbyBicycle profile has an experimental car-avoiding option.
I've had the same problems. Planned bike rides, and often ending up in too rough terrain where I have to push or even carry my bike as it was suddenly a trail and not gravel road.
To help that, I've actually started contributing to Street View. Mounted a 360 cam high over my helmet when I bike, and then use that photo to upload to Mapillary (CC license) and Google.
One is allowed to replace the bottom with a logo ("nadir cap") to hide myself, and because of that I often get people reaching out telling me how useful to check conditions. Not just hardcore bikers, but lots of people just wondering if they can bring their stroller or an elderly family member on some forest walk.
Of course, when I encounter errors I also want to fix that in Open Street Map so that it propagates to other tools. But most casual people aren't using advanced tools to plan their small trip, so having imagery is useful I believe.
I’m kind of in the same boat. A couple of years ago I did a 700k tour on virtually only minor roads (I believe about 10k was on roads with a center line). I used cycle.travel[1]. I’m in Europe, not sure how good it is elsewhere, but here it is incomprehensibly better than Google for this purpose.
Is gravel about it being gravel or about it being no cars? I feel like it's no cars, but I wish people would just say that. Too many people are afraid to speak out about cars for some reason. Perhaps being anti-car is still seen as too hipster or contrarian or something.
How does this compare to Komoot? I usually use that, but I am based in the Netherlands. What i like in ko,oot is that cyclists upload photos. This allows me to see what the road looks like.
Other places I plan is via Strava, Komoot or Garmin Connect - the heat maps help a lot to know where other people ride different types of bikes (road/gravel/mtb).
That'a hard problem I spent some time thinking about and helping. I contributed to OSM surface type on roads. But we certainly lack publicly known user friendly software to mark surface for OSM and then to plan for your bike type. I am happy that work is ongoing, but unhappy with how hard it still is.
And certainly vwru unhappy when people help siloed maps and not shared ones like OSM.
It's a tough problem, I think. It's missing a lot of roads where I am in Bend, Oregon. Basically, anywhere in the western US with Forest Service or BLM land is going to have a ton of gravel roads. The trick is "are they pleasant to ride on?"
Here in the northeast us i know of at least one org that actually does the on-the-ground research to ride and take notes on many sections of road. There's no good way to get a read on conditions otherwise.
Gravelmaps has been a huge help, so has google maps using street view to check for gravel or if necessary the width of the shoulder. Even on side roads that haven't been streetview'd you can still check it at intersections to see.
The planning is VERY time consuming though, lots of permutations of routes to get between 2 points when the goal is to stay off paved surfaces each with various tradeoffs. It would be VERY cool if gravelmap let you input a start and end point and gave you a best route suggestion. Or even if google let you select gravel only.