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Does popularity routing work?

jgforrest
over 6 years ago

No it doesn't, not in my experience anyway.

Here's one example, there are many others.

I created a route in Richmond Park in London, from the top of Sawyers Hill to the junction with Ham Gate. It includes the Strava segment The Dutch Train, and is part of the RideLondon route.

The Dutch Train segment has been ridden nearly 1.8 million times by 116,000 people making it one of the most popular anywhere in the world. I've ridden it over 800 times myself.

Any routing engine that I've tried other than Garmin (on device or Garmin connect) would take you straight from the top of Sawyers hill to Ham Gate, but Garmin takes a weird route out of the park, and back in again.

If I ride the route with re-routing, Garmin ignores the road and tries to send me onto the much less used gravel path at the side, despite being set to avoid trails.

Given how wildly popular the direct route is, what on earth is going on with the routing engine?

 

  • 0 over 6 years ago

    No, and it's one of those Garmin gimicks that advertise well but don't work. Just like the "normal" circuit generation - at least as far as mountain biking is concerned. I've tried it a couple of times for testing purposes. But - as I said before - a gimmick that nobody really needs.

  • 0 over 6 years ago in reply to mcinner1

    Thing is it should work well, it works really well for Strava routing. It might not be an absolute "need" but routing is a core advertised function and for it to not work is a big gap.

  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 6 years ago

    My feedback is that it doesn't work at all ! at least for MTB. My first posts on the forum are more than a year old now... but no improvement noted, still as bad as ever. A true marketing scam !

  • 0 over 6 years ago in reply to Former Member

    Works for me on the road. I’ve used it in Kingsport TN and State College PA.  Well it seemed to work. Made some good routes for places I’ve never been. 

  • 0 over 6 years ago in reply to biker128pedal

    It’s probably something that needs a few tweaks to work better. I hope Garmin will improve it as the basic idea is sound. 

  • 0 over 6 years ago in reply to Former Member

    Keep in mind the Edge is a road cycling device and not MTB. It starts to support MTB but at it's core it is a roadies device used by roadies. The data behind "popularity routing" is what people record and that's probably mostly road rides, so the trails might have little popularity data. 

    As a check make sure that in the activity profile you use for MTB you have enabled trails and unpaved roads. A road profile for example is set to avoid those by default.

  • 0 over 6 years ago

    Is this path paved or unpaved ? If it is unpaved and you create a "road route" it will avoid it. You need to make sure you pick "gravel/unpaved route" when asked when you create the route, for the tool to accept unpaved roads or paths by default. I am just guessing but this might be your issue.

  • 0 over 6 years ago in reply to Martin868

    Its a paved unclassified road.  Look at the Openstreetmap data.

    https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/330400510#map=15/51.4413/-0.2912

    There is nothing wrong with the tagging at all.  Even the Garmin Connect Website's route planner picks the longer route as shown in the op's picture.

    There is far too much ambiguity around how Garmin's route planner works and uses the map tagging available in OSM.

  • 0 over 6 years ago in reply to Daveymorrisuk

    Agreed, it's a road route that I was creating, with minimise distance and avoid trails set.

  • 0 over 6 years ago

    Here's what happens on Garmin Connect:

    • If you create the route on Garmin Connect using routing for "Road Cycling", you get the same route.

    • If you create the route on Garmin Connect using routing for "Gravel/Unpaved Cycling", you get a route that uses the unpaved "Tamsin Trail".

    • If the route (using "Road Cycling") ends just north of the service road (leading to White Ash Pond), it uses the shorter distance.

    • If the route (using "Road Cycling") ends just south of the service road, it uses the long-way around. This is 2.6 miles instead of 0.6. This is odd.

    • If the route (using "Road Cycling") ends at the service road, it uses the path that runs past White Ash Pond (this is really odd).

    I don't think Garmin Connect uses popularity routing (I think it only displays it).