Auto-plot by bikeFORUMS HOME SEARCH FORUMS

Firstly, this website is godsend! It's exactly what I need for plotting routes for cycling. I had to create a few routes for my recent trip to France, and noticed the following:

1. Auto-plot by road does not take account of bike paths
2. Auto-plot by foot does not take account of the direction of traffic

An implementation of auto-plot by bike paths (while avoiding motorways and dual carriageways and taking account of the direction of traffic) would be great addition to an already fantastic website. Google Maps in-built cycling directions already does it quite well as well as cyclestreets.net. Combing that with the amount of creative freedom Plotaroute allows, it would be amazing.

Cheers!

Thanks for the kind feedback - I'm glad you're finding the site useful.

You are right that the Auto-Plot "On Foot" option ignores traffic direction.  This is deliberate though, as this uses pedestrian routing.  So, for example, you wouldn't need to walk all the way around a roundabout in the direction of traffic if you were walking, you could take the shortest route, and you could walk against the flow of traffic on a footpath alongside a one way street.  You would need to use the "By Road" option if you want to follow road rules.

And yes, the "By Road" option doesn't currently account for bike paths.  We have considered adding an additional option of "By Bike" but when we did some testing of this a while ago, the results from the routing services we used (Google and MapQuest) seemed a bit unreliable.  This may have improved now though, so we'll have another look into this as I think a "By Bike" option would be very useful for lots of people.

Thanks again for the feedback.

John

Just want to add a +1 for route by bike. It would be nice to have traffic direction taken into account, mainly because the results can get a little strange. 

(and bike paths too)

I currently find that some of my routes do take into account bike paths/footpaths that I would rather not have when I am planning road bike routes!  Don't know if it's possible but I'd like an option where I can select "bike" and have the choice of whether to include off-road paths or not. 

Thanks for all the input to this suggestion - we'll push this up the priority list!  If we can find a way of being able to choose to route by road or off-road bike we will certainly include this.

John

Hi Matt - there is a "Paved Terrain only" option under the Advanced version of the Make Me a Route feature.   The Advanced version uses MapQuest for routing rather than Google, which offers us more options for routing, including limiting routes to paved terrain, but as the costs of this are much higher we can't make this available for free, so I'm afraid it's currently only available to subscribers.  Subscribing to Ad-Free membership is a great way to support the site though - there is just a small one off charge per year and it gives you a larger map for plotting routes and no adverts on other pages as well.  

John

I'm pleased to say that we have now added an Auto-Plot By Bike option as suggested by Pushkin Passey below.

John