Terrain InspectionFORUMS HOME SEARCH FORUMS

We are very pleased to announce another major new feature that we've added to our route planner - Terrain Inspection.

Using the various new Terrain Overlays, you can now instantly get an at-a-glance view of the type of road, surface and gradient along your route. The overlays will automatically update as you plot your route, so you can immediately see if your route goes off-road, changes onto an unmade surface or hits a steep incline - whichever you decide to keep an eye on.

Furthermore, our new Terrain Inspector lets you examine the terrain at any point on the route for an inch-by-inch analysis.

This is an exciting new development that adds a whole new dimension to route planning with plotaroute.com. Our goal has always been to try to offer the most powerful, yet easy to use route planner available, which of course requires a balance between sophistication and simplicity. We therefore try to introduce new powerful features in an unobtrusive way as possible and hopefully we've done that with these latest changes; the new tools provide another layer of analysis for those who want it while hopefully keeping things simple and intuitive for everyone. We hope you'll find them useful.

There are a few additional things to note:

• The new Terrain Inspection tools are available to all users on both the desktop site and the mobile app. They can be accessed by selecting TERRAIN in the Route Planner (desktop site - bottom right map overlay, mobile app - menu icon above map).
  
  
• Road type and surface data is only available for new routes you plot (not existing ones), as the data is generated when you plot the route. Premium members can use the Snap Route to Map tool to recreate existing routes with terrain data, though please be aware this will also replace any directions, so is not recommended if you've added any custom directions, and the route may be altered if an exact match can't be generated.
  
  
• Road type and surface data is not generated when Auto-Plot is switched off.
  
  
• Road type and surface data is currently not available for routes created using the Advanced mode of the Make Me a Route feature, as this currently uses a different routing engine.
  
  
• The new terrain tools are only available when editing a route, not when viewing a saved route. This is something we may add at a later date, once more routes have been plotted with terrain data.
  
  
• Surface type analysis depends on availability of this data on OpenStreetMap (OSM) - see our How-To Guide if you would like to help improve OSM maps in your area.

Nice!

Excellent, thank you

Colin

This is a truly excellent and usefull addition! Of course, there are limitations as this is based on data on OpenStreetMap (OSM), but it helps with a serious issue regarding plotting cycle routes .... occassionally, and sometimes often, the routing engine uses footpaths (which are not legal for cyclists in the UK). 

See https://www.plotaroute.com/posts/2655/D/1 "I’m using Auto Plot, By Bike, Cycle Map. The route given will sometimes use brown dashed tracks (footpaths), sometimes even if a blue dashed line (cycle path) is available. It seems to ignore green dashed lines (bridleway) as expected."

This new feature does highlight this at the time of plotting a route, and will help to correct those minor errors.

Thanks!

Mark

No, I take the last post back! There nis still no difference between a footpath and a cyclepath.

REQUEST:

The Terrain Inspector shows a cyclepath (blue dashes) as "Cycleway" and a footpath (brown dashes) as a "Footway". Could this be used as a differentiator, so that a change in colour can highlight the change in “Road Type”?

If the routing engine can’t be used to limit cycling to cycle ways (ie, noit use footpaths), maybe the Map Inspector could be used to highlight them as the route is plotted.

Thanks,

Mark

Thanks for the suggestions Mark.  Can you share an example route where you're  seeing the auto-plot By Bike on footpaths and we'll look into that? Now that we're no longer using Google Maps we have more flexibility with routing and may be able to add additional restrictions. 

Sure, I'll reply by email!

Thanks,

Mark

It would sometimes be useful to see terrain on saved routes (a workaround is obviously to just re-edit it - I see terrain in the editor even without actually re-plotting) but even more usefully to be able to change the colours used for each surface type for more contrast between each terrain (e.g. red/blue) and/or with the base map. But this is indeed already an excellent piece of additional functionality.

That's a good idea Garry, I think we always intended to add some of the Terrain features to the View Route page as well as when editing a route, but it was more tricky from a design point of view and then other things got in the way. Thanks for the reminder. The colours already look quite high contrast though - which one's are causing you a problem?

Dark blue or black for road, dark green for off-road - I'd prefer one of them to be red. I know red's used for gradient but you can only display one type of terrain at a time so using the same three colours that are currently used for gradient for the other types would be helpful, to me at least.