#cycling #germany #neuland woah, I'm trying to find out about the german cycle routes network - the so called "D-Routes" but the website they set up is so unusable, it's very annoying.http://www.radnetz-deutschland.de/karten.html the map is old fashioned, slow and you don't see anything but the routes on it. no city names, nothing, you have no idea where you are. wtf?
@distelfliege that fully looks like something from *1970s* tech magazines (I was readiing some recently written by UK govt techs when they first started using electronic maps for the Emergency Services) - but aren't most of the routes uploaded fairly accurately on #openstreetmap?
I must admit I looked at a combined UK/DE/NL "Euroroute" myself and was no wiser to its location and only ended up with "Ein kleines Hotel bei Cuxhaven" as an "Ohrwurm" (as it was one of the only places I recognised)
@vfrmedia I'm an openstreetmap noob.. I never got it to display stuff for me. I don't know if OSM is cycling friendly or if its just me not getting how it works. "D-route 11" gives me lots of results - in indonesia.
the d-route 12 has the name "oder-neiße-radweg" - if I look for that, it's found. but I have no idea what to type in if I want to find route 11..
@vfrmedia ok I found in the menu something called "radfahrerkarte" and it displays the d-routes, but unfortunately it displays everything else too, so next I have to find a way for the map to display less detail first..
@vfrmedia that's what I see right now:
@vfrmedia it looks like someone threw purple and red yarn on a map spread out on the floor *lol*
the red stuff are the d-routes, but I have no idea which is which and when I zoom in the names are displayed but I can't see where they are going anymore.
@distelfliege I managed to get this (OSM won't let me change UI language, I don't know if the same options are in the German OSM). Picked a random bit of Bavaria as I'd been watching Christmas Mass from the chapel there the TV station that streams it often does documentaries about the same area (so I know roughly what it looks like). Switching between "normal" and "cycle" map seems to highlight "quieter" roads although its not clear of the difference between blue and purple..
@vfrmedia yep I get this when I zoom in, but it's useless, I need to see the numberes d-routes when I'm looking at the whole of germany because I'm planning to go from berlin to tuttlingen next year.
@distelfliege yes, the numbering/indexing doesn't seem consistent at all across Länder and in the area I was looking I think at a red route means you've crossed the border into CH.
It really is surprisingly difficult to find a good online cycling map for Germany, even the UK has far better resources and its rare for me to say that when it comes to anything cycling related! (Are they still things you are expected to pay for either in dead tree format or online?)
@vfrmedia maybe. outdooractive.com is a great website, I have used that for planning most of my cycling trips. but sometimes it sent me across sandy forest paths in Brandenburg, which wasn't cool at all!
@distelfliege this is a problem with a lot of these routing sites and the routes themselves (especially in some bits of UK)- they assume you are some person on a mountain bike with a lot of spare time (like middle class hipster kid who is taking a short "gap period" between work or next bit of University, or a retired senior who has similar amount of spare time, and not someone who is riding the same bike they would to get to work/uni and thus would not unreasonably want "normal" tracks...
@vfrmedia I think the routes are like that. I'm also a slow cyclist, I can't ride 100k per day.
another problem is that cycling in germany is really expensive, because you would have to stay at the "campingplatz". and they charge a lot for services I don't need. maybe I'll just ask farmers if I can camp on their land but agriculture isn't what it used to be.
@distelfliege I was looking at this (out of curiosity; current job /lack of emergency cover makes it impossible for me to be :>30km away from key work sites, was amused to find EKD running Bike-Campingplatz in at least one bit of Northern Germany. I didn't compare prices closely to others, but seemed affordable and had proper facilities for cyclists including secure parking and workshop but I imagined shared (gender separated) dorms and someone with guitar singing religious songs 😆 )
@vfrmedia @distelfliege Many of the early, and active #OpenStreetMap members were active in #cycling, because #OSM provided good cycling maps. Alas often OSM tries to be a database, not a site showing access to the database.
One option from a long time #OSM member who's into cycling is http://cycle.travel/map
@distelfliege @ebel that does work quite well, tested it with some obscure places in both my region plus NL and DE, it uses the good qualiity data from UK Ordnance survey (recently released as open source data) and even handles all postcode/address formats across 3 countries!
Only flaw seems to be (at least without registering) in UK it mixes distance units between km and miles (even within route segments) rather than allowing you to select one or the other..
@vfrmedia outdooractive is actually routing me through Ulm and then along the danube which is nice. but its over 900km and that's something I won't be able to do in 2 weeks 😭