Cycling in Sydney Australia
Web based mapping
I love maps. I love cycling. I enjoy putting rides up on bikely. Bikely is great for documenting a single route, but it can't display all the different cycling routes in an area at the same time. I've started looking at different ways this could possibly be done. The obvious one is by setting up a google map, and manually drawing the routes in (The auto-draw function may even work if using roads - haven't tried this as yet).
Before I started however, I thought I better do a search to see if anyone else had started one. And I found one - The Brittish based Open Cycle Map (Sydney Area), based on Open Street Map. I set up an account, and tried to add some routes. All I'll say at this stage is that it doesn't appear to be the most intuitive interface. Adding the correct tags has me stumped just at the moment.
The other gripe with this tool is that the maps and satellite photos appear to be quite dated (compared to Google maps). A lot of the streets around the areas I was wanting to add routes to don't exist (Quakers Hill, Kellyville Ridge). Kellyville Ridge is a new area, but Quakers Hill is well established.
I think more detail could be obtained from routes on Google Maps (like putting comments in). But only those who knew the password could edit routes.
But OpenCycleMap already exists on a world-wide basis and anyone can edit the maps (if they can work out the interface!)
Any thoughts on these approaches, or another tool that may do a similar job?
Before I started however, I thought I better do a search to see if anyone else had started one. And I found one - The Brittish based Open Cycle Map (Sydney Area), based on Open Street Map. I set up an account, and tried to add some routes. All I'll say at this stage is that it doesn't appear to be the most intuitive interface. Adding the correct tags has me stumped just at the moment.
The other gripe with this tool is that the maps and satellite photos appear to be quite dated (compared to Google maps). A lot of the streets around the areas I was wanting to add routes to don't exist (Quakers Hill, Kellyville Ridge). Kellyville Ridge is a new area, but Quakers Hill is well established.
I think more detail could be obtained from routes on Google Maps (like putting comments in). But only those who knew the password could edit routes.
But OpenCycleMap already exists on a world-wide basis and anyone can edit the maps (if they can work out the interface!)
Any thoughts on these approaches, or another tool that may do a similar job?
Tags: map, mapping, opencyclemap, openstreetmap, osm
Replies to This Discussion
-
Permalink Reply by Susan on -
On mapmyride you can search an area and it will list them all for you to choose from if that helps you?
-
Permalink Reply by RobK on -
As far as I can see mapmyride is similar to bikely for searching. Not what I'm looking for unfortunately!
-
Permalink Reply by Susan on
-
I'm not a fan of bikely so use mapmyride instead. I find bikely hard to navigate in comparison and it tends to not like Mac's as well.
Good Luck with the search
-
Permalink Reply by RobK on
-
'I find bikely hard to navigate in comparison and it tends to not like Mac's as well.'
That would be the browser, wouldn't it? I remember reading that people who were running certain version(s) of Safari were having issues, but when they ran firefox, the problems were fixed. I haven't checked the forums lately to see if these issues still exist or have been resolved.
-
Permalink Reply by Boxhead on -
Not sure what problems were being reported but Bikely has been working ok for me using firefox on osx. Currently on firefox 3.0 and osx leopard. Map viewing is ok on Safari 4.0 but haven't tried creating any maps with it yet.
-
Permalink Reply by Dabba on -
Rob, is this the sort of thing that you may be trying to do, but perhaps with each different route a different colour? Or perhaps a bit like this - which is the very early stages of Newcastle Cycleways Movement's recommended issues for inclusion in the local bike plan to be updated in the coming 12 months. The waypoints show what is needed to be done in that area, but they can of course be used for any comment.
-
Permalink Reply by RobK on
-
Darrell, A combination of both of those images is my ideal - Starting off with the map, showing shared paths (maybe divided into several categories, like sealed/unsealed, major/minor etc), then good on-road linking routes (along the lines of RTA and other council maps) then putting different coloured waypoints or comments along the routes. One colour could identify the name and main description of the route, another colour could identify bad intersections/crossings etc along the route, while possibly others for bike shops/cafes/toilets/water etc. Another colour waypoint could be placed in an area, which would contain info/links to printed cycle maps of that local council or area.
This would involve a LOT of work, especially if done for a wide area like Sydney!
How have you defined the colours on your map (30 ks around Newcastle)? I couldn't find reference to a legend anywhere.
-
Permalink Reply by Dabba on
-
Rob, because it was necessary to provide a fairly detailed explanation of the colours on the 30 ks around Newcastle, I did it by way of this page.
Based on my experiences with what I've been doing, I doubt that most people would have the computer or ISP speed at this stage to be able to do what you are trying to do. The greater the number of track points in one of my maps, the slower it takes to paint the image to the screen. Most of my maps have around 1,000 track points, which is insignificant when you consider what you are trying to achieve. I think that probably a better option would be for Bikely and the other similar websites to have a better structure for indexing the tracks and then searching. The stupidity of names like "Bill's ride home" sort of highlight how impractical such an arrangement is. There was an Oz equivalent to Bikely that started up in the last 12 months and I raised this indexing issue with them too. I think that they had also identified it as a shortcoming in Bikely and were trying to address it. Unfortunately, I don't recall what this new site was called. I'll have a look and get back to you if I can find it.
As far as the amount of work involved for one person to maintain such a map database, it would be significant. If you would like to discuss it with me some more, you could contact me at my email address on my website.
-
Permalink Reply by Dabba on
-
Rob, the Oz website that I mentioned is Cyclerides. It is very much in its early stages so there may be an opportunity for you to work in with them to achieve your goal.
-
Permalink Reply by herzog on -
Everytrail is my pick.
It has a "find nearby routes" feature, and you can set the radius. You can also specify filters for, road cycling, off road cycling, hiking, running etc.
And you can group all of your cycling trips on one page.
Here's some of mine:
http://www.everytrail.com/my_trips.php?user_id=36964
I've been using an iPhone app called Trails to do the tracking, and it can post your ride directly to Everytrail straight from the phone.
It also allows you to take geotagged photos during the ride. Great little application, I think it costs $3.
-
Permalink Reply by Owning on -
you can download all the route in sydney to google earth and plot it there....good luck in downloading :)
-
Permalink Reply by Steven Lamb on -
if you have a nokia mobile phone with an inbuilt GPS then sports tracker maps your route via google maps. You can then share the map on the internet.
© 2010 Created by DamianM.
