Cycling Specific routing

I wonder what other sites UK cyclists' are using to plan courses instead of Garmin Connect?

Paul

I'm not sure why they should build a site for their products. Ford, GM, Nissan and so on don't build the roads I drive on. <grin> If mapmyride or ridewithgps or someone else do it better, then why not use them?

Route Planning

I wonder what other sites UK cyclists' are using to plan courses instead of Garmin Connect?

Paul

I use Viewranger with the phone app they provide so I can check I'm on the correct route - it allows OpenCyclemap to be used as the base map and has a snap to route feature, which can save a lot of time when plotting a route. Getting the route into the Garmin is a challenge as Viewranger supports GPX exports but connect does not import the GPX!!!! I'll try Basecamp and see how that goes.

Garmin: Please support OpenCyclemap as one of the map options in connect....you already provide openstreetmap!

I'm not sure why they should build a site for their products. Ford, GM, Nissan and so on don't build the roads I drive on. <grin> If mapmyride or ridewithgps or someone else do it better, then why not use them?

I do indeed use mapmyride, but the 810 uses Bluetooth to sync with the phone app, so the courses need to be on GC really; may as well have bought the 800 if I wasn't going to use Bluetooth, especially as many, myself included have had problems navigating with the 810; well documented in the 810 forum with many threads like this

It may not be the best but I still use Garmin connect to plan my courses on country side less technical courses, as it's quicker to edit the occasional roundabout faux pas and one way streets than it is to create a course from another site, convert that via www.gpsies.com (as a manual upload into GC seldom never seems to work unless I do one pass through Gpsies convert, as discussed more in the following thread), then to upload it to Garmin Connect, plus I do like have my courses as a back up in the GC App on my smart phone, something that appealed when I bought it as I had intended to use the 810 as navigation on cycle tours; with all the navigation problems that is looking far less probable, at the moment I have very little confidence in it. However, where I use sites like www.mapmyride.com is for urban riding, I live in South London, if I was trying to navigate across town I would not currently use Garmin Connect on any level, either route-course planning or uploading a course GPX file from another site into Garmin Connect. I have found course planning in London via Garmin Connect almost impossible, it will sometimes allow cycle paths through parks which is good, but not along a cycle path at the side a busy dual carriageway, where for no apparent reason part way along the path it would deviate off to a much longer route that in short it didn't need to with no way of overriding what it wants to do; I want to dictate the route on my course and not have 'Garmin Connect course planning' dictate it. I have found importing an urban route into GC from www.mapmyride.com also problematic, I had planned a route over the Thames on a ferry, which was straight forward enough to plan on www.mapmyride.com and to be fair in Garmin Connect as well (it was the dual carriage way cycle lanes where I eventually gave up trying to plan the course in 'GC') but when I manually uploaded the GPX file from 'www.mapmyride.com' as described above the route would whizz off into the North sea where I had crossed the Thames on the Ferry, the work around being copying the www.mapmyride.com GPX file direct onto the 810 itself via 'new files' folder in 'F' drive, it uploaded the course just as created then.

The 810 needs to use Garmin Connect for all the features to be used, which would be fine if Garmin Connect was at least as good as many of the other free to use sites, but in short it isn't. With their resources and especially as Garmin Connect is becoming more important to their later products they simply must improve it.

Paul.

I don't disagree with too much with any of yours or other posters comments. My take on the issue is that Garmin is a hardware manufacturer, and a pretty good one at that. I just want them to make the best devices they can and charge me a fair price for that device. In addition, I'd like them to be as open as possible from a programmers viewpoint of how software can obtain and use the data collected by that device so others like mapmyride, ridewithgps and so on can make killer apps for me to use. Even if I have to pay them for the premium services.

What I don't want is for Garmin to throw a bunch of money into a website to try to support their product for a wide variety of people that likely won't completely agree on how something should look or work. That will just mean higher cost of product to me and likely a very closed mouth attitude to independent programmers about how to get to and use the data provided by the product.

Sort of like big government, when their hands in everything, they don't do any of it very well.

Trouble is the 810 is set up to be used with Garmin Connect, so it should to work well and it in my opinion it just doesn't, my 810 bundle cost £479.99 which isn't cheap, for a set up that as at right now simply doesn't do what it's supposed to, it often freezes or crashes when navigating a course, especially when you go off course or lose GPS, the former is easy to do when you are forced to ignore the course and stay within the law by not riding down a one way street the wrong way, or if you haven't noticed in GC that it's navigated you the illegal way around a roundabout before uploading to the unit, which is easily done!

I know of many who are using their 810 as a 510 hoping that the next firmware update will sort the navigation bugs, as far as I am concerned course planning in GC also needs to be updated to offer their cycling specific units cycling specific navigation, if Garmin focus on hardware as you say yes it's good that they allow us to use other sites to course plan, but at £479.99 the 810 is set up and promoted to work with their software, I expect with that level of investment their software should be competitive as well, at least as competitive as the free options on sites like www.mapmyride.com; at the moment it simply isn't and it should be.

Paul

I've just planned a route in 'Google' maps and selected 'bicycling' and it recognised one way streets, using the same start and finishing point in 'Google' maps via Garmin Connect it didn't. I would have thought my request to have cycling specific routing is a simple one as it seems to already exist in 'Google'.

Well I had hoped that the new Garmin connect would be better, but it still sends me the wrong way around a roundabout and will not allow me to stay on cycle paths!