We’ve added elevation profiles to the route listings. They show how hilly or gentle the suggested routes are likely to be:
The vertical scale shows the height in feet, and the horizontal scale the distance along the route, in miles.
The vertical scale is usually 300 feet, unless you’ve found a very hilly route, (in which case the shading is a darker green). (If you want metric units, sign in to the site and change the units in My Settings).
The ‘Fastest’ routes now take into account the delay of going uphill and the savings in time of coming downhill. This means that the routes the planner now finds will be a little more smoother than before, (where there are practical alternatives). We’ll be explaining how this works in a forthcoming posting.
5 thoughts to “Elevation Profiles in CycleStreets”
Pingback: Tweets that mention CycleStreets » Blog -- Topsy.com
This is excellent, a great addition to the site, thanks!
A couple of picky comments:
– suggest the units should be in metres by default – this is what most people (including OS) use for elavation now, so this would avoid having to change the settings
– some faint horizontal gridlines on the profile would be good.
On the site itself, you’ve taken out the ‘don’t include routes with dismount’ button, which means that the quieter routes send you on footpaths (see Journey no. #83992). On this example, it’s avoiding RCN 10 for all it’s worth, which is a shame!
Nice work. From the above post and from my observation of the results am I right in thinking that the ‘quietest’ route is still ignorant of hills? If it is using hill data then it possibly isn’t as keen on avoiding them as I am!
Ah yes, the balanced routes are cracking – gets me on to RCN 10 with no disounting :-). (though the map section graphics aren’t coming up?)
I’ll think about putting both metres and feet on the vertical scales – one on each side might work.
The ‘include routes requiring a dismount’ option was removed when the new Balanced route was provided. Because both Fastest and Balanced routes take into account the time taken to cross a section they will naturally avoid walking routes, if at all possible. Quiet routes will however find the walking routes.
To answer Peter’s point: yes at the moment the Quietest routes ignore the time taken to cross a section and so will find hilly routes if they are on quiet roads. We think this might be a little too ‘pure’ and are looking at how we can fix that. Balanced routes however do take the hills into account.
Finally, AntS, thanks for reporting that problem about the local maps – it was a bug, now fixed.