1) Trail Router (https://trailrouter.com) - This is a running route planner that favours greenery and nature in the routes it generates. It can generate point-to-point or round-trip routes that meet a specified distance. I developed this because I am (or was...) a frequent traveller for work, and want to run in nice areas rather than by horrible busy roads when I'm visiting somewhere new. Naturally, the utility of this tool is limited at the moment for people stuck in lockdown!
2) Fresh Brews (https://twitter.com/FreshBrews_UK) - I've been touring the UK's finest craft beer breweries from my own home in recent weeks. New beer releases sell out very quickly and I was frequently missing out. Fresh Brews is a simple bot that monitors the online shops of my favourite breweries and posts when a new beer is released to the shop, or an item comes back into stock.
Super nice work on trailrouter. The several routes it produced for me in Berlin look quite nice, being familiar with the surroundings.
Would be cool to see how you built it, if you put it on github.
I’m curios about building a similar thing for cycling – crazily neither Komoot nor Google Maps let you filter by type of road, and I’d like to select only bicycle paths and roads where cars can‘t go. Even if it means cycling much longer, I’d simply like to avoid cars and in Berlin it’s possible 90% of the time.
I'll probably write a blog post on how it's built though - there's quite a lot going on under the hood!
Supporting cycling is a possibility for the future. I don't think you'd want to absolutely exclude non-cycleways (as it might make many routes impossible), but you could certainly weight very heavily against them and show on the map which parts of the route were dedicated to cyclists vs which were not.
Congratulations on creating trailrouter! This is one of the most unique and useful side projects I’ve seen in quite a while. I had a lot of fun looking at the various suggestions it offered for my neighbourhood, and I could see how this could help people enjoy their neighborhood a lot more.
If you have the time, I’d also love to read a blog post (or even series) explaining how you built this. Your answer on the Graphhopper forum was very clear and makes me think that a more detailed version could be super useful for a lot of people.
Thanks very much for the kind words! I wasn't sure if others would find the technical details of this topic interesting (it's my first foray into GIS work), but it sounds like they would, so consider a blog post in the works.
Thanks for the link, that’s a very interesting read.
Subscribed to you on twitter to get updated if you publish a post on that!
The thing on absolutely excluding – yes, maybe some things are impossible, but in my planning, it’s really about the journey, so even if I have to go additional hundreds of kilometers, so even in terms of extra days, but via cycling ways and tiny country-side streets (without max speeds over 30km ideally or similar) and not see fast moving cars almost at all, which in Berlin/Brandenburg area, for example, seems to really be possible if you plan it manually. Judging by the success of applying your rules on the trails it surely can be done better than I have seen so far.
Thanks, I didn”t know about this one, the tiles they have are really nice. But still no control over avoiding larger roads or what to prefer as a fallback. I still get some larger roads selected, but it’s definitely an improvement over google maps.
I also made the mistake of trying Google Maps for bicycle routes early last year. Searching for a better alternative, I found komoot.com; perhaps you might want to try it.
For my region, I'm pretty happy with it (although it has its issues in places where you have to pass along bigger roads for short distances). It's OSM-based, though, so that might vary.
Trail Router is amazing! I just had it suggest a 5k route to me and it suggested my favourite 5k route immediately. Currently, it doesn't seem to care about elevation, that might be something to look at if you are running out of feature ideas. Is is open source?
I'd actually also be willing to donate a little for the development of such a cool tool.
Thanks! There is an option in the settings menu to "Avoid hills", and in the not-too-distant future that will become a slider that allows you to prefer hills or avoid them.
It's not open source yet, but I might open it up in the future. There's a donate link hidden away in the About page. Any donation would be much appreciated, and would help with the server costs (it needs a huge amount of RAM to store the whole planet's data).
I just had the exact same experience! It nailed the “close to home” routes I do perfectly. Will definitely use this when I want to change it up and run somewhere else in the city.
Trail Router is great! Tested it out for a few cities I know like Stockholm, Gothenburg, Las Palmas and Hanoi and it's really good.
The only thing I noticed is that it seems to prefer going next to water over anything else and have a slight tendency to take detours to run next to very small city parks. Running past a small city park for 50 meters might not be worth the detour.
I tried out Trail Router and found a trail hidden in the woods within 3 miles of my house that I never knew about in the several years I have lived here. Can't wait to check it out. Nice tool!
Just wanted to drop by saying that trailrouter looks great. One small suggestion. I'd add an option to avoid cemeteries as (at least in some cultures) running through one could be considered ill-mannered.
1. Would it be possible to add an undo button for when changing a route goes wrong?
2. I think this would also work really well for planning routes and/or measuring their precise length. In fact, I have been looking for such a tool for ages! One like yours which also allows taking small tracks and paths and not just roads! Unfortunately, currently it's still somewhat difficult to select the precise route as changing it in some place might suddenly change it almost entirely. (Again, an undo button would be nice.) I assume this happens because Trail Router still tries to minimize a certain loss function? Would it be possible to disable that entirely, so that one could "free-draw" routes?
[UPDATE]: Just noticed that one can actually disable all routing preferences. This seems to be doing the trick – very nice!
More love for TrailRouter here. Especially love that you can export a GPX for a watch. I get stuck running the same unimaginative routes so even the ability to be able to have it plan a round trip from my house is amazing. Even more so that it finds out green space. Thanks for this!
Trail Router is incredibly well done. I've had the exact problem that you're describing. I'm currently training for my first 100 miler and I'm getting bored of my regular routes (which hurts motivation) so I'm really excited to try it out.
Trail router looks great. I put my location in and the first three routes were already regular routes of mine , and the next one was one I'll probably have to incorporate. Bookmarking it for when I travel next.
Trail Router is great for my use-case during lockdown. I've been trying to walk different ~3mi round-trip routes during quarantine so as to not get bored and this is very helpful to give me more ideas. Thanks!
TR worked pretty well. Since coming home from e. Europe two months ago, I’ve been exploring the nearby trails on an almost daily basis. Your website suggested the exact 6 mi hiking route that I enjoyed yesterday! When i cycled through the options for other 6 mile options it became less imaginative and more urban street centric. Still, a good interface and helpful as a reference tool. Thanks!
Trail Router looks fantastic! In light of the shutdowns, I've restarted my running / training and I'm planning for a 10 miler in October. This will be a fun way to plan runs and keep me interested. That's always been my big issue - I get bored easily if I see the same thing over and over.
On trailrouter how do you determine safety levels of roads? I had on one of my generated routes a 45mph road and then a few other times it had me cross I-95 (an 8 lane highway here). Overall very neat though. I'd been using mile meter to draw out manually my routes.
There is a setting in Trail Router to "Avoid Potentially Unsafe Roads" which makes it much more conservative about road choices.
It uses OSM data for routing information, but this is quite poor for pedestrian safety (particularly in the US it seems, where some 'secondary' roads are very safe, and others are death traps). There are specific tags for foot access and sidewalks, but they are rarely used outside of cities. Crossing the I-95 should only be done if there's a bridge going over it, it should never take you across the lanes of traffic (!). If it does, please do email me a link to the route if you don't mind.
Hi! I love the Trail Router. How did you get the data to create a Strava heatmap? I see the API can download routes by ID, but I'm curious how to do it based on geographic area. Thanks :)
I'm leaving a comment here as a reminder too! I've been playing with open street map data to learn routing algorithms, I would love to compare notes : D
* Add sliders for setting greenery and hills preferences (so you can _prefer_ hills, rather than just avoid them)
* Add support for preferring particular surfaces (e.g. tarmac vs trail)
* Add support for creating distance-specific round-trip routes that pass through one or more waypoints (at the moment you can only specify a start/stop location for round-trip)
* Sometimes round-trip routing suggests some very complex routes which would be hard to follow when running. Some work could go into simplifying such cases.
* Improve the UI/UX, it's still quite fiddly, especially on mobile
More distant:
* Cycling support
* Native mobile apps (there are already mobile apps for Trail Router, but they're basically WebViews)
* Offline routing support in the mobile app?!
* Direct sync'ing of routes to watches/Strava would be nice, but there's no open APIs for this yet.
If you have any other suggestions feel free to chip in!
1) Trail Router (https://trailrouter.com) - This is a running route planner that favours greenery and nature in the routes it generates. It can generate point-to-point or round-trip routes that meet a specified distance. I developed this because I am (or was...) a frequent traveller for work, and want to run in nice areas rather than by horrible busy roads when I'm visiting somewhere new. Naturally, the utility of this tool is limited at the moment for people stuck in lockdown!
2) Fresh Brews (https://twitter.com/FreshBrews_UK) - I've been touring the UK's finest craft beer breweries from my own home in recent weeks. New beer releases sell out very quickly and I was frequently missing out. Fresh Brews is a simple bot that monitors the online shops of my favourite breweries and posts when a new beer is released to the shop, or an item comes back into stock.