1. • CommentAuthorengelgrafik
   • CommentTimeAug 24th 2008

    
   I'd love to be able to see all the routes in the area on the map.
   
   I'm a visual person. Right now, the results of your search are all text, and they're only as good as the input by the thoroughness of the user's input.
   
   However, I'd like to see the map come up and have all the routes in a particular area show, so I can get a geographical sense of the area... maybe even connect several bikely maps into one.
   
   You can narrow down the results by choosing the right tags.... so you only see the rural routes, or the urban routes, or the urban and scenic routes, etc. etc.
2. • CommentAuthorengelgrafik
   • CommentTimeAug 24th 2008

    
   The text result also assumes that the user KNOWS where he wants to go. Some of us just want to see the geography to decide where to go today. We don't know the names of all the places. This is a big usability no-no. ;)
3. • CommentAuthorborisacat
   • CommentTimeAug 25th 2008

    
   go to google maps, see the area you want to go to, then search ''bikely'' and a lot of routes will appear. But not all the routes for that area. I do not know why.
4. • CommentAuthorrmellor18
   • CommentTimeAug 26th 2008

    
   I agree, being able to see how other peoples' routes match up to your own would make it easier to merge routes together and come up with new ones.
5. • CommentAuthorsecondlaw
   • CommentTimeAug 27th 2008

    
   I've been very frustrated by this aspect of bikely as well. As I have done some travelling over the past year it has proven very difficult and time consuming for me to use bikely to try to find new routes in areas that I am not familiar with. It has also been very difficult to see if any of the routes I am posting to bikely are redundant, and I am not confident that folks are getting the benefit of the routes I have entered because it's not at all clear that they can find them easily. The google maps approach suggested by borisacat is better than nothing, but it is, as that comment already suggested, still quite incomplete (e.g., only two of eight routes I have entered near my home show up in a google map bikely search of the area near my home) and inefficient in a number of ways (e.g., a search for rides near Sandpoint, Idaho using google maps bikely, turns up dozens of rides in the Spokane area that need to be paged through before a few rides at Sandpoint are displayed, and even then not all the Sandpoint area rides are displayed.) I would really like to see making this aspect of bikely - being able to do a detailed, complete, geographical area search of bikely content that returns rich content - a top priority - it would make biekly a MUCH better bicycling resource.
6. •  
     CommentAuthorPeter-DG
   • CommentTimeAug 28th 2008

    
   Well, look at BikeMap.net and GPSies.com . Both have the feature you are asking for, and both are great in theory but useless in practice. (Actually BikeMap.net 's approach is marginally useable) . The problem is our routes are not points. BikeMap.net shows a "flag" on a map and if you hover your mouse pointer over the flag the route appears (after 5 or 10 seconds).
7. • CommentAuthorkaage
   • CommentTimeSep 1st 2008

    
   I agree this too.
   
   This is the BIGGEST WEAKNESS in Bikely.com!!!!! We want to discover routes visually with map! This same suggestion was #1 in "Frequently Suggested Improvements" -topic but there is no comment about this.
   
   Could development team answer to us??
   
   You don't need to do same mistakes as BikeMap.net and GPSies.com.
8. • CommentAuthordlbolton
   • CommentTimeSep 1st 2008

    
   This thread seems relevant for something I would like to accomplish as well. Cyclists who commute to my workplace (the National Institutes of Health) in Bethesda, MD are interested in generating a map that shows all of the routes people use to commute to the NIH. This would serve multiple purposes, including a valuable resource for new commuters looking for routes to get to work that originate near their home. Although several individual NIH commutes have been entered and mapped here on bikely.com, this site does not offer a way to view all of them simultaneously. We would love to see this issue addressed.
9. •  
     CommentAuthorPeter-DG
   • CommentTimeSep 1st 2008

    
   dlbolton - you're asking for the impossible or at least the impractical.
   
   [1] - if you accumulate all published routes you'll have a huge mess of routes that would be meaningless
   [2] - how do you know if a route someone uses is suitable for another biker - I have seen commuting routes published on bikely in my area that I would not ride at 6 AM on a Sunday morning.
   
   Of course I'd love to have what you're trying get. but when I think through the details I realize it can't be done (in the USA that is).
   
   What we need is a concerted national effort to build routes that can be biked on. Then we'll have something that can be mapped.
10. • CommentAuthorkaage
    • CommentTimeSep 16th 2008

     
    Perter-DG - off course there should be filtering possibility.
    
    If you could choose for example only MTB tagged routes then it's not meaningless. Then you can see areas where is lot of MTB routes and decide to go there biking.
    
    I wan't to see if there is MTB-routes near to my place and visual tool would be most usefull for that. I don't like that there are flags on the map (BikeMap.net). Whole routes should be seen on the map simultaneously.
11. • CommentAuthorScot_Gore
    • CommentTimeSep 16th 2008

     
    Peter DG has a point. This is a worthy goal, but really hard to pull off in practice.
    BikeMap.Net does it the best IMHO. That said scroll over to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul Minnesota. While looking the Twin Cities try to imagine all those routes displayed at once as complete routes. It would be like trying to follow a single spagetti noodle in a dumped pile. This an illustration of Peter is talking about.
    
    With no filters applied, the on map searching is almost impossible to use. When you start applying filters, it gets better, but still hard to use. BikeMap forces tags, but they are limited to how much they can require of a typical user who will just go "elsewhere" if requiried to provide allot of "extra" information. If bikely required you to include at least 10 tags on each route creation, what would you think of this site?
    
    Scot
12. • CommentAuthoralexz
    • CommentTimeSep 17th 2008 edited

     
    The technology exists, but google's using it.
    
    If you search your city for Bikely MTB on Google Maps, you may see your mountain bike trail.
13. • CommentAuthorScot_Gore
    • CommentTimeSep 17th 2008

     
    Googles "solution" is the same as BikeMap.Nets. Google displays search results as a single point, if you select one of the points you can see the detailed route line. BikeMap's is a little easier to use since you can hover over a point without needing to navigate off the page as Google requires.
    
    The point method has limitations.
    
    Google will only display 10 results on the map at a time, so you can never see "all" the routes. As an example, a search on BikeMap at a zoom level approcixmately equivalent to the 494/694 loop (our beltway) for the Twin Cities returns 292 routes on Google. You can see all the points, 10 at time, after 30 clicks of the mouse. If you want to compare a route on page 4 with a route on page 16, not too easy to do or even recognize that it might be helpful. This is what Peter means by "not very practical in practice".
    
    BikeMap.net, rather than only return 10 routes at a time instead limits returns by summarizing some of the results into tighter zoom levels on the screen. If you want to see the routes contained, you need to zoom in to that level. When you zoom in you see the routes you couldn't see before, but lose others. BikeMaps point (i think) are half way between the first and last point on a route as the crow flies. If you are at a zoom level that does not include that halfway point, then the route is not shown on the map even that it passes directly through the displayed area. Once again, great idea in theory but hard to pull off in practice.
    
    If you were an early adopter of Bikely, you likely saw the implemented feature "Nearby" that was part of the early roll out of this site. I think it worked by finding any point on any route at the current zoom level (up to a certain size). It worked great, until all you new commers came along and started providing content that the "Nearby" search engine had to find :) Then it brought the Bikely servers to grinding halt and the entire site would crash.
    
    Now that I've seen a couple of other sites try to pull the move off, I understand better how hard this must be.
    
    Scot
14. •  
      CommentAuthordregerclock
    • CommentTimeSep 23rd 2008

     
    I agree it would be nice to show all the routes in a section of the map visually to find them.
    
    My suggestion however is not about finding maps... but you can once you find a few good maps you like for your area download the Googleearth file of the route... and import it into google earth. Save it there. The go get your next one and save it in google earth... eventually you have a nice collection of all your favorite routes for an area right there on your own computer via Google earth. (which is a free download too)

Discover & Share the Best Bike Rides, Trails and Routes

Bikely provides online maps of over 10,000 bike trails from 50 countries around the world - completely free.

You can browse our collection of bike route maps and join our community to share your favorite rides with the world and post in our forum.