AI Route Planner - Does it Exist?

Yes, different challenges to the suburbs of a global city…

Occasionally I have similar, it won’t let me route down bridleways/ byways etc and I either have to change it to pedestrian or follow lines also.

Edit I forgot to say I use the Google man for a quick review, if it goes blue, its usually paved.

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Think the routing on RWGPS depends on what map you use. Maybe some bridleways are marked as such on some maps, but not on others. Try changing the map type, and see if it lets you route for cycling on it then.

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What would be cool is an app/program that you could pick the start/end point, and say, give me a route for my road bike that will take me around 2 hours to complete in Z2. And it looks at weather and wind directions, and uses all my recent ride data to give me a route. You could add qualifiers like “not too climby today” or “I want a flat fast route today” or “give me a route I haven’t done in a while.”

I think this is where AI could be cool. Utilize my entire ride history, and take into account weather predictions, traffic models (to avoid busy roads or busy times), and popular roads to give me a good route. Also look at previous routes and find ones that I haven’t ridden in a while or roads that I ride a lot. And basically use my ride history of power to speed and use that data to estimate a time to complete the route. Like if I say I want to do endurance at 200W, it’ll look at my ride data and find that I can average 18mph at that wattage so it gives my a roughly 36 mile route for 2 hours.

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A couple of those near me, expanding to 20 mins with one quiet junction.

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But don’t you know this already from your riding? You already have an intelligence who knows this, and it’s you. You know all your preferences, you know how long certain loops take you, at different efforts, you know which ones are suitable for VO2 max, which for Z2 etc.

Does not compute. If I knew I would wake up thinking where the hell can I do this outside?

:slight_smile:

It might not be something you need to use much after a month or so, but finding new suitable routes when you live in a complex environment seems valid - if not valuable.

Not usually. I rarely do the same route, and definitely not enough to know how long it will take me. Maybe if it’s a short 1 hour ride it’ll be a route I know and do frequently. But like 2 hours or 40 miles and above, that’s a whole other story. I rarely ride the same route more than once. And actually I kind of make it a point to do new roads and routes. I don’t think I’ve done the same route twice in the last two years. Hence why I would love an automated route maker. Because I make all my own routes right now. They don’t take a ton of time but it would be cool to have it automated or done faster.

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I would really like to have an AI route generator which I could use to throw in my workout file .zwo and it generates a route which would great for my workout. e.g. no downhills during hard intervalls. Long enough climbs to finish my interval without going back down the hill to go back up.

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Even so, if you’re riding outside 200 to 300 or so times a year I’d think you’d work out your local roads well enough to know which ones are suitable and can be combined to suit your needs.

I’d encourage everyone here to learn how to program and build these route generation tools :joy: Extra challenge - try to make it sustainable.

I’m possibly a minority, but I enjoy building routes. What I’d appreciate is higher access to ride data inside of existing tools (primarily Strava), and the ability to better filter the data. Of course, data is an important part of Strava’s business and they’re not going to give it away for free, so :man_shrugging:

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If its a minority, I’m in it :raising_hand_man:

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I also enjoy planning routes. It’s fun to research.

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Yes, but that’s my point. I can do it. I just don’t want to do it. The app would do it for me and do it faster. It’s a time thing, not an ability thing. Right now, I make a new route for probably 95% of my rides. Which takes time. So if I’m going on a 4 or 5 hour Saturday ride, I’m making a brand new route for it. Which usually means I go to RideWithGPS, click my apartment as the starting point, then start drawing. But as I’m drawing the route, maybe I start racking up too much elevation, so then I go back and start again. Or I try to do a big loop and the route is too long or too short. And like I said above, I try to hit unique roads. I use an app called Wandrer that keeps track of every unique road I’ve ridden. It’s a fun game to try to hit a unique unridden (by me) road on every ride I do. There’s also StatHunters, which is based on the VeloViewer tiles map. But most of the time it’s looking at Google satellite view or street view to look at new roads to make sure they’re ok to ride on, which will include avoiding big roads (4 lanes or more), avoiding certain types of intersections or “stroads” around shopping centers. Basically just trying to make my ride as easy and safe as possible. So it usually takes me 15-20 minutes to make up a route for my weekend long rides. Not super time consuming, but it would be cool to just put in a couple inputs and have an app use all the available info (my rides, my power profile, weather, traffic, my perferences) and pop out a ride. And saving 10-20 minutes of planning for every ride adds up over the year.

Kinda hijacking this thread but I saw someone post a tool that allowed to import the intervals and the route to help with planning, or something along these lines.

It was in a quite major thread here in the forum, but I can’t find it anywhere.

Another vote for this, really enjoy planning big rides - working out possible stops, fitting in nice climbs etc

But it’s basically a zero time thing if you know your local roads. You’d be able to just know what combination will take you 2-3 hours etc. I can understand it if wanting to plan far from home, just not locally.

That’s not the case. I know my local roads. I still take about 15-20 minutes to map out my routes. Sure, I can just go out and ride randomly for 2-3 hours. But as I said above, I make it a point to ride unique roads, roads that I’ve never ridden before, so most of my routes have at least some new roads. But even if I’m riding all roads that I’ve ridden, it still takes some time to map out a specific route for the day. And also as I said above, I don’t have routes that I ride frequently. I make a new route for 95% of all my rides. I get bored riding the same route so I make new routes to hit different roads in different orders or ride them in different directions.

Im in a new town right now with my bike in the back of the car, and I have a 90min sweet spot workout to do. I have no idea where to ride, let alone where a 23mins at 200W is feasible.

It’s imperfect but one solution is:

Strava Subscriber App

Maps

“Go for a Workout”

Shows you local popular segments sorted by popularity and length.

Segment Suggestions – Strava Support

The issue here is that it focuses on interval repeats of a given segment, rather than a route that contains multiple similar segments that might fit what you need, but for what’s hard to find “where can I go do 4min repeats” - it works well.

If you just want to push 200w for 90 minutes you can do that anywhere without significant traffic lights as air resistance is normally enough to let you do that?

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