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Hi Jerry - I've had a look at your route and most of the issues with the directions seem to be due to anomalies with the route itself, form example at 6.2 miles into the route you have plotted a short diversion from the route rather than going straight across the junction.  You can see these anomalies if you soom right in.  To avoid issues like this I would recommend the following:

a) click away from junctions when you plot

b) zoom in close before plotting to make plotting more accurate

c) be careful tio click on the correct side of the road if it has dual carriageways 

You can fix any issues like the one at 6.2 miles using the Replot Section feature under the Plot Functions (click the toolbox icon on the map to access these).

Hope that helps.

John

I see from this forum that other people have had problems with the directions as well. I'm a new user, I found Plotaroute when looking for an alternative to Map-My-Run. My initial impression is that this program is potentially pretty good. One major failure though was the turn by turn directions. Since this was my first major attempt and it is a somewhat long route, about 45 miles for use as a biking round trip, many of the problems may be rooted in operator error (the operator being me). The map worked reasonably well, but when I printed it, the turn by turn instructions had so many errors it was basically useless. The output generated 128 lines. Today I decided to take a pencil and see just how bad they were by making line by line notes on the list with the pencil. I gave up when I got to about line 40 because there were so many errors. I would estimate about 50% were either flat out wrong or at least confusing. I'll try to summarize into main categories:

1. the most frequent problem was "turn left" when the map clearly showed turn right and vice versa

2. identifying turns onto streets where the route was simply crossing over or past a particular street

3. at least 1 instance of a turn significantly out of order

4. directing you from a street around a circle street back to the same street. Note that the distance tally correctly showed the distance between the 2 endpoints of the circle as about .16 miles (distance if you follow the map by staying on the original street) while if a person were to actually go around the circle the distance traveled would be in the neighborhood of a half mile.

I know from previous posts, others have experienced the left/right errors. Has anyone else experienced any of the other problems? Any suggestions for how I might get better directions?

@ Bob Sparkes.

The automatic directions sometimes say "Turn left" (or "Turn right"), when the route clearly goes right (or left). How can I edit the Directions and delete the ones that are not helpful?

By a Plotaroute design I did not notice false direction indications.  May I ask ? At planning do you place the control points far enough away from street or path junctions ?  (Never click on top of junctions)

Bob, thanks, I got confused actually, I wanted to mention John, not you. Thanks for the reply though. I know how to add new direction points, as well as edit the "Notes" and the "Symbol", but not the direction change ("PointType", such as Left, Slight Left, Continue, etc.), nor the "Name".

Once I had followed John's advice (of Dec 22nd), I was able to edit Directions exactly as required. I also found out how to add new Directions at places where the direction of the route had changed, but the automatic Direction indicator had not notified anything.

Hi Bob,

(not the OP) I seem to be able to change only the Notes, but not the direction nor the name of the course point (these are exported as Name and PointType in the tpx file, respectively). Unfortunately, my GPS device (Lezyne) seems to ignore the Notes, and displays only the direction and the point name.

Furthermore, it seems that any non-ascii characters are discarded for the point name. Not sure if that's intentional or not.

Jan

Hi Bob,

You can edit directions by clicking on them when in edit mode in the route planner - select the route for editing and click the "Edit This Route" button at the top of the route planner map.  Then  click "DIR'NS" in the action menu on the map, click on the direction you want to change and edit the text accordingly.

John  

The automatic directions sometimes say "Turn left" (or "Turn right"), when the route clearly goes right (or left). How can I edit the Directions and delete the ones that are not helpful?