Or it can be stored for looking at later or uploaded to the web to share your work with other people. This can be transferred onto a smartphone or the dreaded GPS device mounted onto your bike. Once you’ve devised a route that you’re happy with, the best thing to do is save it as a GPX file and save it to your computer. We’re in real danger of losing what makes maps so unique, giving us a feel for a place even if we’ve never been there. A few years ago Mary Spence, the President of the British Cartographic Society, accused the likes of Google maps and Multimap of wiping out history:Ĭorporate cartographers are demolishing thousands of years of history – not to mention Britain’s remarkable geography – at a stroke by not including them on maps which millions of us now use every day. Also missing from Google maps are contours showing hills and valleys and all manner of other historical landscape features. Using Google maps means disregarding a whole world of motor traffic-free possibilities. As a result the don’t show useful cut-throughs, canal towpaths and other tracks that are accessible by bicycle but not by car. Google maps are ubiquitous but they’re a very bad idea for planning a bike ride since they are based on a roads database built for motor vehicle satellite navigation. These websites will calculate distance, show you an elevation profile for the ride and even generate turn by turn instructions. uk is a great website that will devise three routes to chose from (fastest, balanced and quietest). If you don’t fancy drawing your own route you can always get someone else to do it for you. The click-drag editing tool is very handy for making changes to routes, or adapting routes drawn by other people and imported into BikeHike.
BikeHike lets you draw your route freehand or do the routing between points itself using Google or Open Street Map (you select which one by clicking on Options). You can also take a look at Google’s aerial photography which can be handy at times. In the end I found the BikeHike (free) to have better tools for map-drawing and provides easy access to Google Maps or the Open Cycle Map (a version of Open Street Map made especially for cyclists) and – in a simultaneous smaller window – the OS Landranger map. There are desktop applications too and though I’ve experimented with RouteBuddy but quickly found its interface very primitive and it kept crashing. One very obvious benefit of computer-based maps is that instead of covering your paper maps in crayon marks, there’s no shortage of websites that will help you draw your routes. That doesn’t mean dismissing computer mapping entirely. It’s far to easy to become a GPS Gollum: a miserable, unthinking slave to the ‘precious’. And like bike computers they tend to trick us into to paying more attention to average speed and distance covered than is healthy when touring. GPS devices change the way you see the landscape, they conceal as much as they reveal and they will end up enslaving all but the most strong-willed rider. The way I see it, a hand held GPS device has a lot in common with the One Ring of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.Ī person wearing the Ring would enter a shadowy world revealing the physical world from a different aspect, and from which physical objects were harder to see… The Ring slowly but inevitably corrupted its bearer, regardless of the bearer’s initial intent.
More and more people are using GPS devices instead of maps. This can be helpful when planning a route, especially if you don’t have access to the paper versions.
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A few people pointed out OS Maps are also available free online, via Microsoft’s Bing mapping website.
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It is not just a road map application, and not just a topo map application.In the first of these touring tips I wrote about Ordnance Survey paper maps (specifically the 1:50k Landranger series) and why I thought these are the most useful and satisfying UK maps for the touring cyclist, and how they can be borrowed for free from public libraries.
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Easy planning and management of geodata, Waypoints, Routes or Tracks.State-of-the-art animated layer technology.Ability to view your waypoints, routes and tracks on Road, Topo, or Satellite Imagery.Use with any of RouteBuddy's high resolution Road and Topo maps.The application sports a universal toolbar for both operating systems and features are comparable throughout.
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RouteBuddy is an advanced digital desktop map application for Windows and Mac OS X.
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