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Show HN: Bike route planner that follows almost only official bike trails

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Hey guys, I built a route planner that is mostly focused on bike touring and using existing bike infrastructure.

For each request you're shown what bike tracks/trails your route uses and can further explore them by showing them on map or going to the official trail route.

The main idea for the app is to have a friendly and easy to use planner that would make heavy use of official bike trails data (mainly from OpenStreetMap) and make it easy to plan a longer trip using the best possible bike routes out there.

Currently the app only works for the Euro region but I'm planning to add North America very soon and then rest of the world.

Technical overview: Route finding - Graphhopper sitting in a docker container on a Hetzner server somewhere in Germany. It has 38 GB of graph data(Europe) loaded into RAM for a fast graph traversal.

Web App - Next.js 14 with Typescript, backend on the newest version of .NET

Map tiles - right now I'm using MapTiler their free tier but planning to switch to my own home server soon and host the maps on it.

Would love to see this for the SF Bay Area - lots of great cycling around here and I'm unsatisfied with using Strava to create routes!

One of the most frustrating things for me with snapping to official paths is not being able to modify it for common workarounds (for instance, going across the Golden Gate bridge, everyone takes a shortcut through a parking lot, but every map routing platform I have used forces me to go the official route and messes up my nav)

7 hours agoby wilson090

This is very cool and very useful as a commuting cyclist. The routes that OSM and Google give me don't always have a high "reasonability" score in that they may be the most direct routes, but the road conditions are very uncomfortable for cycling for any one of many reasons.

One thing that would be very useful is to color the segments on the map based on the waytype. The proportions are given in the summary but unless I already know the route I can't tell where exactly those segments of difficult cobblestone are.

1 hour agoby gorgonical

Looks interesting! Unfortunately doesn't seem to let me add more than one point on my route. In the console I see

`Error fetching route from Graphhopper Error: Network response was not ok`

I tried a couple times and got this in the U.S. In Europe I picked a couple random points and it worked fine.

19 hours agoby jameal

Sorry, forgot to mention. The planner is a mess on mobile I totally forgot to make it mobile friendly as I didn't think anyone would want to plan their trip on a phone.

20 hours agoby allg12

If only Berlin cobblestone was mapped as "cobblestone" not "sett" on open streetmaps -_-

Had to customize https://brouter.de/brouter-web to make something workable. But i's annoying to paste script, route, export gps, send to phone, import in komot just for a 30min ride. (Can share if anyone is interesed. Just be very respectful please, it does not avoid footpaths either)

2 hours agoby anotheryou

Nice work! I run ridewithgps.com and am responsible for all our mapping and routing. If you ever want to pick my brain about anything related to bike software, and of course grapphopper / vector tiles, feel free to reach out, email is in my profile. I'm actually about to dive into fixing up some custom graphhopper routing profiles today for some new route planner updates we are about to release!

17 hours agoby cullenking

Nice!

I added a similar feature to cycle.travel (my site) a few months back. 5% of the work was writing the code to route only on waymarked routes, 95% was writing code to "heal" the accidental breaks in OSM bike route data...

21 hours agoby Doctor_Fegg

Are you aware of "brouter"? Depending on the routing rules (upper left selector) you can choose multiple trail preferences.

https://brouter.de/essbee/

21 hours agoby nodehopper42

A great concept, but there's one big problem: many official bike trails are crap.

Sometimes it's actually better to take the road, or you end up on a windy route that's near impossible to follow, debris everywhere, no right of way, etc.

I would like to try this with a "prefer offroad" option.

19 hours agoby greener_grass

I love where you're going with this, nearly all of my little side projects have something to do with maps and bikes. No comment on how the routes are as I'm not really familiar with any good routes in bigger Euro cities, but as someone who rides around NYC a lot this would be really useful in making routes for visitors who aren't as keen on riding in NYC traffic.

Mobile needs some work. Are you planning on open sourcing this? I'm a mobile dev that might be able to clean that up a little. Good candidate for React Native.

17 hours agoby chainwax

Hey everyone, I spotted a bug with the default routing profile. It was set to regular bike routing instead of the touring profile, even though the UI suggested otherwise (the Redux state didn’t match what was shown in the UI :D). I’ve fixed it, so it should work as expected now! Love your feedback, thanks so much! The project is in a very early stage so I didn't expect such a response.

16 hours agoby allg12

I spent a minute or two trying to create a route but couldn't figure out how to do it. I'm on mobile, using chrome. I didn't see anywhere to enter coordinates.

19 hours agoby unstyledcontent

This does a much better job than anything I've seen before. Nice work. It still doesn't generate routes I'd use as they're too circuitous due to the poor cycle infrastructure in the UK. However, it does a good job of highlighting good options and options I didn't even know about.

14 hours agoby benjiweber

Hmm, I've more often found myself wanting the opposite - a way to plan bike travel that follows reasonable roads rather than the Silly Sustrans Routes. Does your approach generalise to that?

6 hours agoby lmm

Thank you for this. I personally appreciate the easy to download GPX for my Wahoo. For reference, I've been using [0] to get around the city since Google Maps sucks here. I also really like the routes suggested by [1], but their mobile app is super buggy.

[0] - https://cyclers.app/

[1] - https://www.cyclestreets.net/

20 hours agoby pppone

This may not be the site's problem, but why is the OSM map showing some place name labels in Gaelic? Montenegro is "Am Monadh Neagrach," Greece is "A' Ghrèig." Last I checked Gaelic is not a widely spoken language in either of those countries (and I'm nowhere near Scotland).

17 hours agoby rafram

Here's a cool demo I saw recently that allows a cyclist to specify risk tolerance for busy roads, based on traffic data. Take the direct, busy route, or the roundabout way, using bike paths where available.

https://rc.nau.edu/cranc/?profile=ibc&layer=OpenStreetMap

20 hours agoby jubjubbird

Not bad! I'm an avid bike camper and I just tried creating a route through Sweden and it does a pretty good job. We are a bit spoilt for choice here with bicycle routes.

The only feature I'd want is to be able to print the route on paper maps. I wonder if print CSS could be used to create pages of the whole route.

17 hours agoby INTPenis

Constructive feedback: (i am on mobile). The map pulls up somewhere in Europe, even though I am in the bay area. I can’t really see for sure because the side bar covers the whole map. I cannot zoom in or out at all. When I clicked to add a point, it just adds it in a random location. The map is really zoomed out so a few pixels is like 100 km. There is metadata displayed such as the length of my route, but it seems I cannot input a length and have it create a route for me

I have personally had good luck with my Garmin watch. If I start out near a major trail, it tends to suggest routes along that trail. I’m able to input a desired length such as 10 miles and then it suggests multiple routes that are close to that length and use major trails. My biggest complaint with the Garmin is that it tends to suggest the same routes every day.

18 hours agoby joshribakoff

Exciting! For me would be a nice complement or competition to, say, Komoot.

Constructive feedback: at least on safari, it was not as smooth to navigate as other map apps, and also a bit cumbersome to add waypoints, etc.

A small but important thing - there is a typo in the “activity” spelling.

Hope that helps, and best of luck with it!

12 hours agoby dkga

Nicely done! I use Komoot and RidewithGPS, but this is a nice tool if you want to plan a route that relies on bike trails as much as possible.

Would be cool to also show the elevation for a given segment along with its distance (in the route trail list).

And maybe when you click on a segment in the map, it should highlight that segment in the trial list so you see the length of that segment.

I realize you're just using existing map data, but some bike routes seem to be broken up with very small (couple km) gaps (shown in grey) -- is that really the case? (see Loire a Velo 4 for example)

17 hours agoby insane_dreamer

The menu takes up the entire screen on my phone and it is not clear how to close it.

21 hours agoby NowhereMan

Works very well, it exactly replicated my everyday route to work.

19 hours agoby lqet

Reminds me of a story: two years ago I was riding my bike, doing a 45 miles ride from Montreal to Dunham. I was following Google Map's directions and it led me inside a Canadian Army base (Farnham). I saw modified pickup trucks full of guys with rifles about 100 metres from the entrance which said "Keep out" and Google wanted me to go there. I didn't. They changed it now.

18 hours agoby simlevesque

In France, there is https://www.francevelotourisme.com/itineraire/gps

UI is not as good but, there is very useful tools like camping, train station, the ability to split your trip in steps ect.

21 hours agoby grbi

This looks really great! Do you offer an api as well? I'm part of the team behind https://cyclema.ps and we'd love to see if we could incorporate this as a backend.

18 hours agoby thenewrohirrim

Typo on the menu: Acitvity->Activity

21 hours agoby perpil

Are tracks and trails paved? I'm always looking for urban routes, which occasionally uses paved "trails", but also bike routes, bike lanes and smaller less trafficked roads.

18 hours agoby bagels

Any plan to make it open source?

21 hours agoby kilokilosupa

This is phenomenal! As an avid bike packer, I've always wanted this. Eagerly awaiting the expansion to North America. Please don't forget about Canada when building ;)

18 hours agoby SonicScrub

It has a few graphical issues but it's definitely cool, here in Tuscany I just grab the car recommended track on maps because if I select to go by bike it suggests off-road, which is a no no for road bikes

21 hours agoby amarcheschi

Have you seen www.cycle.travel? It's an excellent bike route planner made by an indie developer. Your GUI is much more pleasant, and the official bike trails idea is good. What you're missing is writing start and destination points instead of clicking on the map. Maybe you could get together and make a killer product.

Edit: I see now that the cycle.travel developer is here in the thread :)

21 hours agoby carlosjobim

Thanks for doing this.

BTW Typo: 'Acitvity type' in the UI should be 'Activity type'.

18 hours agoby hermitcrab

Holy shit it's awesome!

I've been bikepaking for two years now and I wish I had this tool

I've used komoot in the past but I was never satisfied with the paths it suggested and had to rely on local guides

I've checked with some of the past trips I id and it guesses correctly all of the best paths

19 hours agoby Sacco215

Seems completely broken on mobile.

18 hours agoby ghostly_s

"Add new point" button doesn't do anything. Falls over at the very first hurdle. 3 error in the console,

        POST https://routes.trailimap.com/route/ 400 (Bad Request)

        Error fetching route from Graphhopper Error: Network response was not ok

        Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'paths')
    at g (page-c19a2a89477d3054.js:1:35496)

16 hours agoby mvdtnz

What I really want form a bike route planner is a map style that shows smaller roads as you zoom out. When planning a cycling I'm interested in tiny back back roads but they are hidden as soon as I zoom out on any map enough to be useful for route planning.

21 hours agoby ollybee