14 posts tagged with "Routing"

Dirt-first routing sends you down forest roads, and forest roads have gates. Most you open and close behind you. Some are padlocked, and the only thing worse than a locked gate 40 km in is one nobody told you about. Routes now carry their gates: drawn on the track, avoided when they are shut, and called out on the way.

Open TET sub-trail I-01 in Sardinia the other way round and the app used to say 14 hours 18 minutes for 169 km. Nobody rides it that slowly. Today the same trail plans at about 6 hours 40 minutes. While you ride, the estimate now learns how fast you actually go, and it remembers that for next time.

This morning's post said any track can now be ridden either way with legal turn-by-turn, built when you import it. For the Trans Euro Trail we went one step further: the server now builds every one of its 331 sub-trails, both directions, in all ten navigation languages, before anyone asks. Opening a TET trail no longer builds anything on the phone, and a country offline pack now carries its trails, so you can import and ride them in airplane mode.

Follow a GPX in the direction it was recorded and the turn-by-turn is good. Follow it the other way and, until today, the line sent you round every roundabout on the empty side of the road. A recorded track is a path, not a route: reversed, it runs against one-way streets, divided carriageways and roundabouts. As of today every imported GPX, TET sub-trail and Library line rides in either direction on a legal route with full turn-by-turn.

Plug the phone into CarPlay or Android Auto and the car screen used to show a map of its own. The route was a thick white line. The basemap ignored your language, POI choices and night mode. The turn arrows on Apple's card were not quite the ones on the phone. As of today the car draws the same map as the phone, and the vehicle marker behaves the way Google Maps taught everyone to expect.

For a month the roadbook program has been building its foundations: a data model that carries the official FIM/FIA structure, an exporter that real rally readers accept, a symbol library drawn glyph by glyph, a print module measured off the FIA's own Diagram 1. Today the last and largest piece ships: a full roadbook editor in EpicRide, and with it the whole pipeline — from any GPX to a printed, regulation-shaped book — is live.

Since July the rider app has been able to turn any track into a rally-style tulip roadbook — the Rally side of the Road ⇄ Rally toggle reads the corners straight off the GPX shape, no road network required. It was a document: something to scroll with a thumb at a fuel stop. Today it becomes a navigation mode.

Two weeks ago the map stopped being flat: the routing graph learned elevation, the road score grew a climb axis, and the server could finally tell a mountain road from a merely bendy one. All of it, though, lived behind an API. This week it reaches the phone.

This was the week we stopped trusting the navigation and started measuring it. Real rides, real device logs, and a string of bugs that had been hiding in plain sight — one of them for three months.

We route motorcycles through the Alps. This week we discovered that, as far as the software was concerned, the Alps were not there.