The web app was made by my wife while attending Hackbright Academy in SF. I'm really proud of how much she's progressed in such little time, so wanted to share what she made with everyone.
It also works in Melbourne (just tested my daily ride) for when you get back.
NB: you can change the endpoints graphically. Though it's gotten caught up on an unnecessary roundabout, as if it were a way-point (even retracing the route to include it...).
That's awesome. In theory it should work anywhere where Google has elevation data available. She just made it to scratch her own itch, getting around SF.
It's on the FAQ and, without saying the exact price, is discussed on the application. It's an education program, so I don't think a "Pricing" tab would fit as well (it'd feel a bit cheap, like Phoenix College).
I should not have to dig around the FAQ to find out it costs $12k, that's a large sum of money to consider spending before jumping into the class. It should, at the very very least be on the application, if not on the front page.
The price (at least for me) was not a _frequently asked_ question, but rather the _very first_ question I thought of asking.
One route indicated the lane cove tunnel in Sydney, a place where I can't run or cycle, I could get squished.
Would be interesting to use long/lat co-ordinates, could be really great for bushwalkers and their specific ___location.
Combine this with something like zombie-run, have the zombies attack at the bottom of a hill/vice versa, you could have a hit with the hard core running community.
Would be nice to see the alternative routes, not just the flattest, but maybe challenging ones, best rated.
But what you've done in a few weeks is still awesome. Well done.
...it does route planning, but the speeds aren't just based on distance travelled but also the elevation. So, it's not so much that it avoids the hills, but it'll only send you over them if it's not faster to avoid them.
You don't seem to handle bridges correctly; mapping from "North Vancouver, BC" to "Burnaby, BC" reports a 65% slope the moment you come off the Second Narrows bridge -- because you're jumping from sea level up to almost 200' above sea level. I realize this is a problem with your geolocation data, but there are probably ways you can clean up that data.
Another example is going from "nanaimo and 12th, vancouver, BC" to "nanaimo and 15th, vancouver, BC": There's a bridge in the middle of that which crosses a 30' deep chasm, but you're showing it as being "very difficult" because you're calculating for someone cycling down the side of the chasm -- which would indeed be nearly impossible!
I noticed this problem as well. I live in Ithaca, and crossing one of our many gorges generates grades of +/- 150% (as an example, try starting at "Arts Quad, Ithaca, NY" and ending at "Bess Brown Center, Ithaca, NY").
Seems like it would be a little bit tricky to try to systematically identify steep ravines like this in Google's elevation data, but it's certainly an interesting problem.
Which in turn made me wonder what the steepest road in the world is (linked below). According to the Wikipedia article, there is a 10 meter section of Bradford St. in SF that averages 39-40% grade.
Most of the complaints I've read so far seem to center around a lack of data: apparently Google doesn't have elevation data for a sloped bridge, nor for whether a particular tunnel is walkable. It's an excellent idea and well-executed given the available data.
I see a routing problem. I had assumed this tool would give longer routes to avoid steep inclines, but that's not always the case. Take the suggested case: Nob Hill to Russian Hill in San Francisco. Drag marker A to the corner of Vallejo and Powell (to the east of that big hill.) Now drag B to Union and Polk (to the west, and one block north of Green.) The resulting route includes some "very difficult" parts along Broadway when it could suggest one block over to Pacific and eliminate those black dots.
Pretty interesting, looks like Google Elevation API misses some tunnels though (looking at a route that should go through Broadway tunnel right now). Tunnels are key for getting the Flattest Route™.
Business model: least work routing for truckers, big RVs,
people towing trailers, etc. Pitch as a fuel-saver,
promote with ad-supported local and special-interest ads.
Support click-n-drag re-routing as Google Maps does now.
Note that while many truckers travel recurring routes,
some pick up ad-hoc LTL (less-than-truckload) shipments
and must replan routing with nearly each shipment. For
fun, demo using:
Tucson, AZ -> Tucumcari, NM
Tehachapi, CA -> Tonopah, NV
An ideal route isn't best characterized as "flat" - I agree that "least work" (in a mechanical sense) is better. In reality it is as you say however - a personal trade off - some people just love hills too :)
Yeah I'm the same, I look for the steepest rides, I look at my commute home as part work out. Still, no matter which way I take, I still have to climb ~500ft
I've been using Marble ( http://marble.kde.org/ ) to show me elevation profiles of routes I bicycle. This site is pretty cool too! (This site works everywhere there's map data, not just SF.)
I'd been thinking about making something like this for a while (I'm in Seattle). Glad that someone with more time and skills than me got it put together.
What's the basic idea behind the optimization algorithm?
Haha, we could really use this sort of custom routing in NJ for finding the route using the fewest roads. If I use Google Maps to go to the local mall, Costco, etc. it ends up using about 16 small side roads, alternating left and right turns every block. Takes forever. Meanwhile, if you know what you are doing you can make it there in 3 roads, one a major highway, which is much faster than any of the side roads Google Maps loves so much. Just getting rid of all the turns helps immensely.
It's a navigation system specially designed for bikes, it takes into account how flat is the rout among many another things like bicycle lanes, speed and safety, it's really quite cool.
If I plot a route from Hyde and Bay to 6th and Mission, it routes me over Nob Hill. If I change it two streets to 4th and Mission, it routes me around the Embarcadero, which is much flatter. Is there a reason it takes the more direct (less flat) route in the first instance?
Having played around, the route given seems to vary slightly as I move an endpoint slightly at either end and then massively recalculate - perhaps it caches certain segments and favours those?
Thanks for this! Cycling is my preferred way to commute, so I expect this to come in handy. I just confirmed that my usual work->home route is in fact the flattest.
Awesome! Boy, this graph highlights why my evening commute (SoMa to Noe) is killer in comparison to the morning commute.
PS My wife is in Hackbright as well, it is an exciting time in the program (for other HNers, it's the last week of the current cohort). I heard about FlattestRoute a few weeks back, it looks really great!
The length of the route is affecting the slope of each segment.
For example, Bolinas, CA to Vacaville, CA has steeper segments than the Bolinas, CA to Dixon, CA even though they take the exact same route out of Marin and Sonoma.
The extreme example, Bolinas, CA to Boston, MA never gets above a four percent slope.
That's due to limits of the Google Elevation API, it only allows a certain number of samples to be fetched at a time. The app's only meant for use over short distances, like around a city.
This is great. Nice work and excellent visualization.
There's a pre-existing tool I like to use, which is not nearly as nice looking but does allow you to specify your maximum grade: http://amarpai.com/bikemap/
So cool! I've been waiting for a bunch of bike-apps-in-progress to come to fruition (415bike, I'm looking at you: https://github.com/415bike) but now the wait is made much easier with this!
Would be nice for Lisbon, too. It's called the city of 7 hills (plus it's got trolley cars and a Golden Gate of sorts, the latter made by the same company as the GGB).
The dots used for showing the difficulty can be dragged when altering the route. Other than minor finicky things like that, it seems to be a neat idea. Cool work!
My wife (the creator of this app) happened to showed it to someone from Google Maps today. It was demo day at the school she's attending and they were there.
http://www.hackbrightacademy.com/