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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

Rule #1 of bicycletouring: Never trust a computer.

I have several paper cycling maps that I maintain (sometimes they need to be updated) because one of my dearest hobbies is bycyclecamping.

I've let that computer betray me several times, no more.

I've used both Google maps and OSMAnd. One summer I tried using osmand offline feature to download my entire route.

I still prefer paper maps, a compass and dead reckoning.

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How's that different from looking at a digital map and planning it yourself? I personally trust navigation most of the way (I'll double check where it tries to send me roughly, but I don't look at details), but I always check out the destination and put the marker on a place where I see or expect parking to be available instead of blindly going to the address. If you add waypoints on a digital map instead of using paper, you can still have turn instructions, time planning, distance measurements, etc. yet still plan how you like to drive.

Nothing against paper maps, just curious if there's a reason why that wouldn't be best of both worlds.

Directions for cyclists are just that much worse. On a long tour, unless you spend the time looking into every intersection, you may end up for a couple miles on a highway/expressway/avenue with cars going 40-60mph, and scaring the crap out of you. This isn't an argument against digital maps of course (you can still make a track and overlay that onto a map), but just wanted to add a bit more context.

Does that also happen in well known apps like OsmAnd or any of the OpenStreetMap.org default routing engines in an area where the roads are tagged correctly as car-only roads xor cyclepaths are available? Because that sounds like a bug we can fix.

The issue with OsmAnd and OSM.org in the US is often that roads are either not tagged properly or they are tagged as cycle paths because the local government has designated them as a cycling path, but the street itself is quite unsafe. There's no real problem with the path routing libraries, a lot of it is just the data.

I've thought about exploring an alternate set of tags to tag something in OSM as a "popular" cycle path, but I'm not sure how to go about proposing that tagging system.

strava for route planning base on street "popularity" is pretty good at picking safe routes.

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