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With various sites and smartphone apps offering to provide friendly bike routes, I thought I’d give one a try. The results were interesting rather than straightforwardly successful…
One of my jobs is teaching Bikeability courses at schools in Harrow. That means my commute ranges from 15 to 18 miles, depending on the part of the Borough I have to get to. Normally, I just ride the same route to Harrow and then split off to the specific school. That way, I don’t have to think about directions until the last couple of miles. My route uses a lot of main roads – they allow you to ride pretty fast and some have bike/bus lanes to speed past the traffic. The middle third of the journey is on bumpy, tight, segregated bike lanes that avoid dual carriageways with slips roads, tunnels, and large roundabouts. It seems like a fair compromise, but is a bit of a puncture minefield when I use road tyres instead of Schwalbe Marathons.
Cycle Streets claims to offer bike-suitable routing that can make use of bike lanes. It has nice looking options of “Quiet”, “Fast”, and “Balanced” routes. I rode to work today on the Fast route, and then home on the Quiet one. I was on my road bike, so I wanted smooth roads, no broken glass, and minimal junctions.
The route in was pretty good – 2 miles shorter than the way I had planned myself and it did save me time. There were a couple of annoying bits of residential road where I had to keep slowing down for T junctions, but it did save me 5-10 minutes over my usual route. There was one junction where the required turn was impossible, though. I had to go past, make a U turn, and rejoin the route. It is also the school holidays right now and I suspect that some of these roads would be choked with school traffic in term-time.
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Steps
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Glass on the ground
The route home was a whole other matter. It had me riding down alleyways which seemed to be essentially pavement (i.e. illegal). It had me carrying over railway bridges. It had carpets of broken glass. It crossed main roads on offset crossroads (i.e. right turn, short hop, left turn). And after 11 miles of riding from Harrow, I saw a sign saying 5 miles back to Harrow! It was pretty quiet on some of the roads, but the ride home took 40 minutes longer than usual. Trying to navigate all the complicated over/under passess, weird spirals from bike-only underground roundabouts back up to street level, park edges etc. was difficult. And then to really top things off, the route sent me down an off-road bridleway near to my house. In the winter, it would be far too muddy to ride on a road bike.
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Singletrack on a road route?!
It’s nice to see these services trying to encourage cycling, but using them is baffling. They can provide some general ideas of where to go but without a good GPS (including detailed street mapping), the routes would be impossible to follow. Even when you are on-track, it defies belief that the track is supposed to be a cycle route. I think my standard tactic of using Google Maps to get directions and then Streetview to check for cycle lanes is much more effective. More often than not, the direct A road route has bike lanes, priority over minor roads, and fewer wrong turns.
I’ve worked out that going to work that main roads are nearly always the easiest. Tried one of those mapping sites to see how it would direct me from home to the office, not a journey I make often, it was longer and slower than usual and took some interesting paths as well.
Just had a look at that CycleStreets site and its appalling. It sent me down some really dodging busy roads when there are great cycle routes running parallel on another road. Good idea badly executed.