On Wed, 20 Jul 2005, Neil Williams wrote:

On Wed, 20 Jul 2005 23:57:32 +0100, Colin wrote:

There is a small part of my conspiratorial mind that makes me think it
might be part of a wider plan though.

What says you all?

I'd say that cycle routes are very subjective as there are many factors
that can make them good or bad to any given individual cyclist, and as
such they're best planned with a map and experience.

To some extent. Certainly, people have different likes and dislikes for
their routes, but i think there's a reasonable amount of agreement about
what makes a good route. The problem is that the mapping sites don't
incorporate that - they just find the shortest route over the roads,
possibly avoiding classes of roads which they think are scary for
cyclists.

An idea i've been kicking around for a while is to start a website - a
sort of 'cyclist's rutter' - collecting people's tried and tested routes,
broken up into routes between key nodal points, so that someone wanting to
get from A to B can come along and pick out route components which will
help them. This would beat just using a map, since it would incorporate
human judgement on the routes. The routes could also be annotated with
comments, pictures, directions, whatever, which would make them more
useful.

tom

--
The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease. -- Voltaire