Route Creation, On-Line

With all the Internet mapping sites that give you driving directions from point A to point B, there are now a rash of sites that will do the same for your bicycle. A few are well known and there are a few lesser known ones. I will attempt to go through a few of the more popular ones and provide my thoughts on which are good and which are not so good.

MapMyRide

One of the more popular mapping sites is MapMyRide, It has a large community of users and the new interface is better at route creation. You can make routes public or private and you can search for routes in your area by city, state or zip code, among other criteria. The good thing about MMR is that if you use the auto routing features it will provide you with a cue sheet. On of the bad things about MMR is that they massage to elevation data so you don’t know exactly what it is and by my account it severely underestimates the elevation gain. One nice feature is that MMR will automatically generate code you can insert in your blog or website to give you an interactive map of your route, a very handy feature.

CourseMapper

A new kid on the block is CourseMapper. It interfaces with all Garmin devices and provides some really interesting features. One of the significant ones is called the CourseCompactor. This feature removes unnecessary track points from your course, making them smaller, allowing you to fit more of them on your device. Another nifty feature is that you are not restricted to using Google Maps as your data provider, others include Microsoft Live Maps, Yahoo Maps and Open Streets. If you have the Garmin Communicator plugin loaded on your PC you can also upload and download directly from your Edge or Forerunner. I have not played with this much but with the features listed I think it is worth a thorough going over.

BikeRouteToaster

BikeRouteToaster has been around for a little while and is the one that I use almost exclusively. It does use Google Map data, including elevation, but it does a much better job than MMR when it comes to elevation profiles and total ascent numbers. It also features auto routing which will automagically generate a cue sheet from your route. A couple of the cool features is that you can offset the route from the center of the road. This is especially good on out and back rides where Garmin’s tend to get confused about which part of the ride you are one. There is also a speed option to designate how fast you will ride on flat areas along with a checkbox to allow your speed to slow on ascents. This feature alone comes in handy if you are using the Virtual Partner feature of your Garmin. Files can be saved as courses, history or GPX files and also as Google Earth files. It is one of the better bicycle mapping applications on the web.

Tracks4Bikers

Tracks4Bikers is a brand new site, still claiming to be in beta test. It basically builds routes like all the other sites, but seems to do it just a bit faster than the rest. Also the elevation chart lists the communities you are going through. It automatically auto-routes and creates a cue sheet as you build your route. It also allows you to build off-road routes for the more adventurous among us. Garmin devices and courses are supported and you may view your routes using Google Earth or Microsoft Visual Earth. Worth a look see.

These are just a few of the on-line routing options for cyclist everywhere. There are others that I have not had time to look over or review. If you know of any others, or if there is one in particular that you use please comment and list it here.