Riding an ebike has dramatically changed the routes I take when commuting because I now prioritize safety and enjoyment over pure efficiency or avoiding inclines. My commute is 25 minutes on an ebike vs 70 on a regular bike, or 30 in a car in traffic.
Also something to consider is that I can happily cycle 2-3 hours on a flatish route on a normal bike, but will find hilly routes something I do not do.
On my eBike I'll happily explore hills without thinking about it. Given that my eBike is pedal-assist, you still have to work hard to get a top speed going up a hill but I no longer feel hills are a problem.
Barely related but EV drivers also change their path. I don't have an EV (car or bike) don't really like driving in traffic (too chaotic for my brain) I often take smaller, slower roads where I just coast along smoothly. That said I wish I could try an ebike or even an EV.
Reminds me of how I had to take feeder roads and turn off the freeway during bad traffic when my shitty old toyota would overheat if I couldn't get good airflow into the radiator :P
Oh terrible flashback. I had an '87 Jetta with a similar propensity. Stuck in traffic in the summer, I had to run the heater on full. Brutal. Handy that the heater core is a mini-radiator, though.
My first car was a beaten-up old hunk of junk. I knew it was time to get rid of it when I realised that every time before I drove it, I was planning my route so that I'd be least inconvenienced if it broke down at any point along that route...
It is amazing how folks have to plan when their vehicle is ‘non-optimal’. For the almost opposite effect, I had a Ford Ranger (passed unwillingly to me) that even with 700lbs of weight on the back axle and good winter (non-stud) tires sucked in winter. I was very careful about my route anywhere.
To go back to the first point there are issues with too much progress. It makes us lazy. Not enough and we might suffer. The balance is important.
I remember one anecdote about Northern African culture. They don't mass produce tech, instead they go with the flow and find solutions on the spot, by the means of a few tools. They say it's smarter to do it this way (maybe, maybe not), surely it keeps your mind creative.
Also, in dev circles, having too much compute power makes your solutions bad. Because you can just ignore the innefficiencies. Plus it's self feeding through the hardware market (more bloat, more sales)
Buying an eBike is a lot about choosing the motor you want then hunting down a bike that uses the motor. I would strongly suggest that you buy from your local bike shop and buy the brand that the bike shop normally stocks.
Cost me £1700 (about €2000). High-end Mid-drive motors pushing 75nm+ are expensive. Bosch Pro CX line and Shimano Steps are the other two types available. If you start looking around, you see the cheaper mid-drive, i.e. Bosch Active Line starting around £2000 and are suitable for lighter people. The high end motors are usually combined with high end parts and bigger batteries. Thus you end up with bikes costing between 3-4k.
It's saved me an absolute fortune. In fact after owning it for a month, my wife wrote off my car. We just took the insurance money and didn't buy another car going down to a one car family.
Electric bikes are not as easy to take apart and sell on. (I'm sure I'll be proved wrong.)
I have a gold standard D-Lock that is side mounted on the frame (weight not an issue) that I use when parking up. There is also a dutch style rear wheel lock mounted to the frame I also use. The battery has a key that keeps it locked to the frame. The head unit for the eBike display is removable and I take that with me whenever I leave it locked up making the motor unusable.
Basically you're trying to steal a 25kg (55lb) bike with multiple security features and relatively unique electric parts that people would be wary of buying due to lack of guarantees.
Sometimes if I'm popping into a shop/café, I use the bike stand, lock using the dutch lock, and just take the head unit off. I'm guessing somebody could pull up in a van and just lift the bike but the opportunistic 'snatch' is so not going to get very far.
I'd recommend multiple bikes. Ebikes can be inherently boring to go for a long ride on as you are essentially free-wheeling. Nothing quite like the quiet of the road as you are cycling along. Ebikes always make a whirring noise.
As a way to get from A to B quickly, nothing beats them in a city.
I did an Air Pollution piece for the BBC comparing exposure of somebody walking, cycling, and driving in and around Bath. As the cyclist, they told me I was travelling around the city a bit too fast for the pollution monitor to get all my data correctly. ;)
I don't have an e-bike, but a friend got one. In addition to the motor, his advice was that you should choose the control system. There's a small handful of companies that make the controls, and his impression was that he preferred the behavior of one particular brand over the others.
I'd still go with whatever your local bike shop stocks. They do go wrong at some point and you will need a repair and even a courtesy bike while it gets repaired. Shipping a bike is not fun.
I daily a Felt Nine E-20, it's a mountain bike with front suspension. I also have a Cube 400 and a Juiced u500 cargo bike.
I recommend spending $3k on a bike with a Yamaha or Bosch motor, it's easy to justify that crazy price if you look at the money you'll save in gas/payments/gym expenses. Most importantly, I enjoy my commute now and I feel like a part of the city in a way that car commuting doesn't give you. Also, get a pedal-assist bike not one with a hand throttle, trust me it's not better to have a throttle.
Disclaimer: My new startup is ebike related but I'm not going to be selling any bikes or hardware.
You can choose how much help you want from the motor and you normally go faster with a ebike (using a bit less muscle power).
I shaved a few kilos off my weight by using an ebike for a few months.
If you like your bike commute and don't mind getting sweaty you might prefer a normal bike.
No, I still expend enough power to keep my heart rate at ~160bpm during my ride, but now I cut my commute time in half and I ride more than twice as often.
For me it's a combination of consistent speed and being able to not care about inclines at all. The safest bike route to work for me is ~2 miles longer than the optimal route and includes a steep incline. This is a pain on a regular bike, but no big deal on my ebike.
I live in Seattle and there are a lot of hills when going east/west because it's a glacial area and the glaciers come down from Canada north/south. Fun!
It's an interesting problem because there are so many factors and even the goal isn't constant from day to day.
Goals
- get from A to B as quickly as possible
- get from A to B as safely as possible
- get from A to B as enjoyably as possible
Factors
- fitness of rider
- type of bike (Riding a fixed gear bike up a steep hill is bad for enjoyment, but riding a mountain bike up a steep hill is not)
- weather (headwinds, tailwinds affect time, affects safety of certain routes as well - don't tell me to ride down a steep windy hill when there is a possibility of ice)
- time of day (affects safety due to light levels)
- traffic volume
- number of lights/stop signs (this affects fast riders more than slow ones because of the effort wasted accelerating and braking is greater)
- number of turns (turns make the rider slow down and wait for traffic and also increase the complexity of following a route)
- scenery/environmental factors (eg. ride through an industrial area or through a waterfront park)
And it's also not said that all these factors have a linear impact on the Figure of Merit. I guess that this might be a nice application for a machine learning classifier, to rate a route's ride quality depending on all of these inputs (and more.)
NB: "Hybrid" bike in this context (probably) means a city/commuter bike, not an electric/human hybrid. "Hybrid" bikes used to describe upright bicycles with flat handlebars like a mountain bike, but less aggressive and narrower tires more suited to commuting than to trails. These days the industry is calling them "fitness bikes"; one presumes to avoid confusing people who think of "hybrid" as meaning battery-powered, eg in the automotive context.
Sorry, I did not clarify, this has been my experience in bike shops in the US in the past few months (I had not previously looked at bicycles in some time).
Wonderful. I'd really like these same features in Waze and Google Maps - if it means I can avoid having to cross a busy intersection that's not a 4-way stop, and reduce stress and increase safety, I'd gladly accept a route that's a few minutes slower.
Yeah, this is a serious problem with Google Maps directions. They want to send cyclists down the fastest routes, which are usually the least safe routes. There's a route in Kent, WA that Google was recommending that was downhill on a 45 MPH two-lane street with no shoulder or dividers. Meanwhile, about a mile further south there was this safe, car-free route that wound through residential subdivisions.
As a cyclist another large issue I have with google maps is a suggested route's overlay having no transparency, so it's not possible to tell which parts of the route are indeed safer bike lanes and not just riding in traffic.
I find myself constantly getting directions, then cancelling the navigation so I can once again see indicated bike lanes and adjust accordingly. A slight opacity on the route indicator would be a godsend.
Not just for cyclists. Around here Google Maps will find "shortcuts" through single track back country roads which are especially dangerous in winter by car or bike.
They will respond to feedback about such roads not being suitable for general traffic.
If you are in the US the data problem is likely an artifact of TIGER which has hundreds or thousands of miles of roads that are given a single generic class which ends up being pretty unreliable outside of developed areas.
Even in the Bay Area, it's not hard to get GMaps to try to e.g. route you through a park, a fire road, a private road (the type with HOAs and nasty signs about how they'll prosecute you if you try to drive down their precious street).
It's not GMaps, but I've been using Bike Citizens and it has an option to select one of three profiles, depending on how much you want to avoid busy/larger streets (Note: as far as I know they don't use Mapzen's algorithm.)
Only a tangent, but I just started a new job and used Google Maps to find me a route and it's absolutely glorious. It's on roads I never would have thought of, avoids streets with heavy traffic, only has 3 traffic lights.. I'm not sure if it's just dumb luck, or the fact that there are a decent number of neighborhoods through Palo Alto that are relaxed tree-lined streets, or what.. but it's only a couple miles shorter than my commute to my old job and an order of magnitude more pleasant. Looking forward to using this API to see if it recommends changes.
I happen to know those intersections. They could have improved that wiggle route simply by rating the intersections. I'm not sure but it looks like they were not doing that.
The old route crossed two stop signs and did a left turn at a traffic signal. Left turns at traffic signals really suck.
The new, proper wiggle route is two left turns and a right turn, all at stop signs. Left turns at stop signs are not that much worse than going straight across -- and vastly better than a traffic light. Right turns are practically free.
So by simply rating the difficulty of intersections using a global metric, it seems like they could have made the same wiggle improvement without getting into rating each section of street. My point here is not that assessing things like accomodation_factor and road_stress are useless. Rather it appears that they've overlooked the much simpler, global improvement of rating intersections.
Only tangentially related to your post, but, two new traffic lights are being installed on the Wiggle. Haight is getting nine new lights, two of which are at Scott and Pierce. Maybe people will wiggle slightly differently to avoid the left turns at the lights.
Yeah, the SFBC (SF Bike Coalition) is not super happy about those lights. Better for the bus, which is good, but "will also cause delay for pedestrians and bicycle riders."[1]
There's no good way to avoid them westbound, but we can be certain eastbound wiggle traffic will start taking Page to avoid the left turn at the Haight & Scott traffic light. And that's going to stress the notorious Scott & Page intersection even more. They're currently adding pedestrian safety improvements.[2] We'll see if it's enough.
Unless.. I wonder if timed bicycle signals would help make the traffic signal routes preferable. Not sure if it would work, but that would be a dream.. just flow through the wiggle unimpeded. I can't tell if they're considering it.
Is there any way to see a demo of this algorithm for a route of the user's choosing? I'm not familiar enough with San Francisco to evaluate the improvement mentioned in the blog. If I could try some routes in Atlanta, however, I'd get a better sense.
Hi! I'm with Mapzen. Yes, the default for `bicycle` are now 0.25.
If you're familiar with Leaflet, it's also pretty easy to draw routes in mapzen.js and pass different parameters to the router -- check the bottom of that post.
Wow, first thing I noticed using MapZen is it sends me over a heavily trafficked freeway overpass to my office... when a detour of only a few hundred feet has me going over a very pleasant bike bridge DIRECTLY into my office parking lot.
Will have to check out of the rest of the route vs what Google Maps has me doing now, though. I'm pretty happy with the current route but I'm new to this job so I've got a lot of route exploring to do.
I see it in the pretty pictures when I zoom in. I'm not sure what the colors mean. It's a dashed blue line.
Openstreetmap seems to not be able to find ANYTHING when I search -- not address, not business name. Hell, if I type "google" it comes up with something in Germany. I guess I just don't know how to use openstreetmap.
The OSM search is an address/place look up search engine, not a generic search engine. When you look for "google", you're probably getting this point ( https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2903635928 ) which is Google's office in Munich, Germany. You'd expect this sort of thing to come up for a result for "google" :)
I am curious what sort of things you're searching for, and what you expect. Perhaps there's ways to fix it?
Remember, Google has considerably more money than OpenStreetMap.
The screenshots in the article would be more helpful if they were zoomed a little closer, at least enough to show all the street names being mentioned. A topo or shaded relief map would also help.
I'm glad people are working on this. The bike directions on Google maps aren't very good, IMO
Anything that can help make safer/more comfortable cycle routing is great step forward. Cycle routing is definitely more complex that driving because of the issue the article mentions.
I tried this out. My city is pretty notorious for having incomplete cycling infrastructure. i.e.) you get local areas that have cycle routes, but you often have to brave some craziness to get anywhere for real.
For my most common routes, it seems to be making the same choices as Google Maps. They definitely aren't the most optimal or comfortable choices, though I suspect this is at least partially a data problem. Steep grades, stairs, and difficult to find turns (more my city's fault that anything) are on the route, and it takes you though the straightforward but less safe connectors instead of detouring through neighbourhoods.
Perhaps one more tuning parameter is needed that would allow weighting stress vs distance?
>I'm glad people are working on this. The bike directions on Google maps aren't very good, IMO
I agree, but they are certainly better than nothing. There are so many times I have wished for a real-time, traffic sensitive routing feature on Google Maps when it comes to bikes.This usually happens around rush hour when I am pinned up against the shoulder trying to take the lane and being cursed and buzzed repeatedly.
I am also really glad people are working on this, it is really cool and so full of potential.
So I decided to see how to get to that nice Pho place across town .. 600 Washington Ave
Philadelphia, PA 19147 or the one next door at 610 Washington Ave
Philadelphia, PA 19147 .. in both cases it truncates off the street number and drops me at a wrong location. Does that mean OpenStreetMap needs some assistance in that area? Even stranger if I put one of those addresses in both source and destination it does a strange 5 block loop to get back to the same wrong start point.
Google seems to only have gotten the address coverage it has by sending vans around with cameras and then making people type in the addresses for CAPTCHAs
There's a variety of reasons that such data hasn't made it to OSM (resources, licensing issues, disagreement about how it should be integrated, disagreement about whether it should be integrated, etc.)
A friend has been working on a similar project for a while that allowed the rider to tailor, in great detail, the kind of route required. The algorithms involved are pretty interesting!
Any chance it might eventually allow users to specify a single start/end point and a desired distance? That'd be much more useful for people who ride for sport, and even though there seem to be a few websites that generate such looped routes, they don't appear to do it particularly well.
I ride in London, and love https://www.cyclestreets.net/. There are versions for the web, android and now iPhone. It has a 'quietest route' option which I love. Android version gives you voice navigation. I put the phone in my shirt pocket and have it talk me through quiet streets avoiding the hassle of traffic. Open source. Runs on Openstreetmap data. Needs funding and promotion.
Yes -- at the bottom of the post we show how you can use our mapzen.js library to draw routes on a map. If you know Leaflet it's relatively straightforward.
Is there a bike routing product that uses this new api that I can use?
I spend hours finding the "less stressfull" bike routes.
I like hills but I really value safety.
Strava[1] provides a cycle route builder that uses the popularity of routes based on their dataset of uploaded rides. As it's using recorded rides, typically by local riders, I've found it produces good routing; quiet roads similar to those you'd choose if you knew the area well.
Wow. I was just playing with Strava last night and didn't realize I could build point A to point B routes because the interface is so impenetrable. (tip: search for address, then zoom the map WAY in manually, because it doesn't bother finding the address for you, click on the map to produce a dot, search for 2nd address, zoom WAY in and click to place your second dot, god help you if you don't actually know how to find the places on the map with your own two eyes).
Then it automatically built a route on some of the most heavily-traveled and bike-unfriendly roads in the area. (SF Peninsula locals: Marsh Road, Middlefield bike slaughter through Palo Alto). At least it only had a few turns. Google Maps did far, far better.
It's a rabbit hole, but there is pretty good support for loading OpenStreetMap data onto Garmin devices (other device makers did a better job obscuring their formats):
I would buy this if it was significantly cheaper than a phone and made it easy to adjust those tuning parameters. I prefer to keep my phone protected on the bike in case of a collision / fall.
Leaflet is for requesting and displaying raster tiles on the client. PostGIS is for storing and managing geo data. Leaflet and PostGIS do not talk to each other. Inbetween you need a tile renderer (like Mapnik).
Leaflet is a great library if you don't need much (use OpenLayers then).
Where I am located it is legal, and honestly there is not much alternative.
The roads google maps instructs me to take for their bicycle directions are not bicycle friendly. I am directed to take a narrow road with just one lane on each side with motorists going 55 mph, even though there is heavy traffic and no room for motorists to safely pass.
It seems like google maps is optimizing for road incline instead of safety. I resorted to using their pedestrian routing to get a route with sidewalks, but of course then it doesn't take road incline into account. No E-bike here. And then oddly enough, the other day their pedestrian routing sent me through A CONSTRUCTION ZONE. That path was definitely not bike friendly or pedestrian friendly.
Google maps' bicycle directions never send me down a greenway, it always wants me to be right beside cars. If I have already biked 10 miles, you really don't want me to be right beside cars, as my bicycling becomes more unsteady as I become more tired.
Riding a bike on the sidewalk (or a divided bike path) is actually pretty dangerous. Cars aren't expecting there to be 15-25 mph traffic when they pull in to driveways or make turns.
The most common type of bike accidents are cars failing to yield when turning or using driveways, and divided bike paths and sidewalks only make it worse.
I try to be super vigilant when crossing crosswalks and driveways when using the sidewalk, but pretty much all of the close calls I've had have been because I was riding moderately fast on the sidewalk.
It might solve the complaints motorists have, but then you'd have the complaints of pedestrians to deal with. In two major cities in my country, bike lanes have been added to the pavements as a bright red stripe on the side of the pavement closest to the road. Local pedestrians shouldn't walk on that portion of the pavement, but they still do, and if you ring your bell or shout for them to give way, they either ignore you or yell at you. It’s actually much faster to simply cycle on the road with the cars.
Good god, please no! The most harrowing pedestrian segment of my commute isn't crossing the 8-lane highway with poorly timed lights (though that's a close second). It's the one block where the bike lane is officially marked as being on the sidewalk.
The legality of riding your bike on the sidewalk varies by state, county and town.
In a couple of places in Portland there are signs specifically directing cyclists to use the sidewalk because of streetcar tracks.
Likely not as many (most?) sidewalks aren't officially open to bikes (Regardless of enforcement on the one hand and regardless of some people preferring to use them on the other).
I remember as a 12 year old a cop swore at me and told me he was going to take my bike if he saw me ride on the sidewalk again. So then 2 blocks later ANOTHER cop is swearing at me calling me crazy and going to drive me home for riding on the road when there was a sidewalk to ride on. I laughed and said the other one told me to get off the sidewalk. He called him and they got in an argument and hung up on him. I just rode my bike on the sidewalk.
Heh, that's awesome. I think it illustrates how confused people are in general about where bikes are supposed to be, which I think is a complicated cross of law, culture, cycling ability, and infrastructure.
The police have never hassled me for being on any road on a bike. But man, do the dudes in pickup trucks with truck nuts love to tell me to get off the road.
Within the downtown area of Washington, DC, bikes are not allowed on the sidewalk. (This is roughly the area bounded by Massachusetts or Florida Ave. on the north, Georgetown on the west and the Capitol on the east.) Couriers, tourists, and a lot of others disregard the regulation.
It really varies by the city. Some prohibit bikes on sidewalks, others allow them at least in some areas, and some only allow children under a certain age. There's no consistency.
Hi! I'm with Mapzen. Setting `use_roads` to zero means a preference for using roads tagged in OpenStreetMap that have bike infrastructure, as opposed to roads without bike lanes.
We don't route on sidewalks, and will avoid paths that are tagged `bicycle=no`. You can get a sense of these on our bike map. https://mapzen.com/bikes/
Where is your bike lane data from? For example, the chicago loop detail on the linked page is incredibly (years now) out of date, and would send people down routes that have replaced bike lanes with dedicated high speed bus lanes.
Have you considered using data from the California Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System (SWITRS) in your routing algorithm? You can filter traffic collisions for those involving bicycles in order to identify roads or intersections particularly dangerous for cyclists.
