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.
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.
I'd actually also be willing to donate a little for the development of such a cool tool.
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).
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.
This is great work! I've been doing this manually, so I appreciate you building this. Bookmarked!
Here's a link to an example route that I got that includes one: https://trailrouter.com/#wps=52.32928,20.94020%7C52.32805,20... Here's a link to that cemetery on OSM: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/60865696
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!
Really great work!
19 miles and over 3000 feet of elevation climb. Nice! :)
when I run, I sometimes pick an entirely different route midway, just to avoid waiting at a light regulated intersection.
being able to filter those out would be a real winner for me, I dont know if traffic lights are indexed anywhere though.
Wanted to +1 others request for learning more about how its built!
Kudos and stay safe :+1:
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.
* 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!
