The state of free bicycle trip planning tools

While the quality of openstreetmap has changed from unusable to what is now arguably the best map for bicycle trip planning in recent years (at least in germany) unfortunately free bicycle trip planning software has not.

The following table is probably not complete so please post your suggestions if you know about other tools.

I just tested FOSS and web based tools because commercial applications like TTQV tend to be running on windows only anyway.

So here is the current state of the tools I checked. What I would really like to see in the future is a gpsies.com like semi-automatic-routing feature but based on osm instead of google.

stand alone applications:

Software

OSM tiles

Google maps/aerial images

WMS

Garmin maps

rectified images

Automatic routing

Manual route planning

semi-automatic routing

Viking

yes

not allowed

via hack

no

no

no

yes

no

QLandkarteGT

yes

no

no

no

yes

no

yes

no

web based tools:

Software

OSM tiles

Google maps/aerial images

WMS

Garmin maps

rectified images

Automatic routing

Manual route planning

semi-automatic routing

marengo-ltd.co.uk

my hacked version

yes

no

no

no

no

yes

no

pifpafpuf.de

yes

no

no

no

no

no

yes

no

gpsies.com

yes

yes

no

no

no

Google API

yes

Google API

openrouteservice.org

yes

no

no

no

no

OSM

no

no

My current workflow ist still using about 2 or 3 of these tools because fortunately all of them are able to read/write GPX file format.

Currently I just set up a hack which will translate tile requests into WMS to allow using them in viking. This is basically the same setup (with a slightly modified mapfile) already in use at wms.openstreetmap.de and available from Openstreetmap SVN.

An example tile URL for this kind of setup would be http://wms.gegg.us/tms/DOP_RGB/12/2143/1406.png. Please note that this data has not been approved for Openstreetmap use so please do not use these tiles for mapping.

3 Gedanken zu „The state of free bicycle trip planning tools“

    1. WordPress default to not allow more than 2 links 🙁

      For a first glance. cyclestreets seems to be UK only.

      What I’m looking for is assisted manual route planning. I currently tend to start from something calculated by openrouteservice and then import these route into one of the other tools for manual corrections.

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