Show HN: Trail Router – generate running routes that prefer greenery and nature | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Trail Router – generate running routes that prefer greenery and nature

trailrouter.com

402 pointssamcrawford128 comments

Author here. Trail Router is a running route planner that prefers greenery and nature in the routes it generates, and biases against busy roads. It can generate round-trip routes that meet a specified distance, as well as point-to-point routes.

I've written a detailed blog post about how Trail Router works here: https://trailrouter.com/blog/how-trail-router-works/

I developed this because I am (or was...) a frequent traveller for work, and I like to run wherever I visit. But I don't enjoy running on busy main roads, and I found that without careful and time consuming route planning that is often what would end up happening if I didn't know the area. Trail Router is my solution to this problem.

After a previous discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23177351) received quite a lot of attention, dang reached out to suggest I post a Show HN to reach a wider audience. I've addressed some of the original feedback too - for example, you can now prefer hills in your routes, as well as avoid them.

We sorely need this for cycling. Komoot is the closest thing but it doesn’t do mileage requests like your app here.

This is awesome!

EDIT: In addition to optimizing for green routes, optimizing for low speed car zones would be a killer feature.

Thanks! Cycling is on the to-do list. But I'm conscious it probably wouldn't just be a single category - there would need to be separation for road cycling and mountain biking.

The routing algorithm does already prefer roads with low speed limits, but there is definitely more that could be done in this space (e.g. a slider to set a preference to avoid higher speed roads). It also depends on the availability of speed limit data (I use the OpenStreetMap database).

The state of apps/web apps for planning road cycling routes is abysmal. If you can implement this you'll immediately be the best.

I am curious why you think this. I run https://ridewithgps.com and always love constructive feedback to improve. There’s always improvements to make, but I wouldn’t quite go as far as calling things abysmal!

The new Strava feature is pretty good IMO

footpath is pretty great for planning and adding features regularly

One of the main reasons for this is a lack of data. The Strava Heatmap (crowdsourced data, based on past frequency of use) is pretty much the best. OSM tagging is insufficient for real good routing, and it doesn't take traffic patterns into account.

Thus, a lot of route creation is dependent on hyperlocal knowledge. Strava Route Builder, with the heatmap, goes fairly far on this, but it too isn't the best.

This is a really hard problem to solve.

You could almost do with a ‘how safe you felt’ rating for each road. Would obviously take a while to build up the data.

I frequently do 50km - 60km cycling routes from my home and I've manually figured out the greenest and least busiest routes.

I tested it with your app and the route is near identical to what I've figured (over the course of several thousand km's of trial an error).

I'm amazed!

Edit: I'm usually on a mountain bike.

cycle.travel does have a feature for mileage requests. It is not very much optimized for dirt routes though...

Thanks for the recommendation - cycle.travel’s my site!

I’d like to do a dirt/gravel profile. Main reason I haven’t so far is that it’s very hardware-intensive (as in tipping over into renting another Hetzner box).

Man thanks so much for your work! Been using it for some time now especially for planning long distance routes. That's where cycle.travel really shines (plus I really love the 3D altitude visualization ;-)).

I usually tend to export routes and navigate with komoot. Komoot for long distance planning is terribly slow as soon as you hit ~200km+.

I just wanted to reply this cannot be as Komoot is also using CH (fast routing algorithm using GraphHopper) but yes, they are relative slow for fast routes. The reason seems that they create a very big response (5MB) in these cases and then it takes more seconds to visualize this. For current & original GraphHopper the response is highly optimized and so it is much smaller (20x) even with comparable road data (like elevation, surface, bridges/tunnels and road class)

btw: in general Komoot is a nicely polished app. I can only recommend it :)

I absolutely agree. Routing using a phone is loads of fun. I do have the paid version and I highly appreciate their open source-ish character.

Besides large response data and a slaggish planning interface @ komoot: try routing from northern Italy to Sicily: Komoot doesn't seem to know the ferry departing in Villa s. Giovanni to Messina. Komoot will always - no matter how may vias you place - route you back north and send you on a ferry in Salerno. Yes, I know, I could split my route and such. Yet, I love the idea of my planning tool to show me the complete route - including official transportation ;-)

How funny, Trail Router also happens to be hosted with Hetzner. Right now in their auction there's a E5-1650v3, with 256GB RAM and 2x 480GB SSD for 73 EUR/mo (including VAT) - which is exactly what Trail Router runs on. That's incredibly good value for money. Lots of RAM is crucial for applications like this.

I think Doctor_Fegg means that he needs one new server per vehicle profile (?) as OSRM is used for cycle.travel and it does not allow multiple vehicle profiles unlike GraphHopper ;)

I didn't know that. I've been spoiled by the always wonderful GraphHopper. Thank you for your tireless work on GraphHopper! Trail Router and many other projects would not be possible without it.

Thanks!

And thanks for building on top of it and making a useful app :)

Well, kind of. cycle.travel runs on my fork of OSRM which does allow multiple profiles. But it still needs a separate hierarchy for each one, which would be another 14GB RAM.

Aha, thanks for sharing this, didn't know that this is possible with OSRM too

Komoot does mileage requests. I use it nearly every ride.

Maybe check out Huli who are working on exactly this amongst other things https://huli.life/

this actually looks pretty cool, but if i'm being honest i just want to use it because they had the guts to call their company hooli.

huli looks promising, but they just have cycling right now. It's a no go for long(ish) runners.

This already exists! It’s an app called EasyRoute

This is actually a wonderful product - thanks for making it! I've looked for a website that did this for a long time, and this works surprisingly well. It actually produced a route that is very similar to one I found myself.

The blog post provides a lot of insights. Good read. Some questions.

Do you plan to support area routing?

And you write: "However, the good news ended there: Openrouteservice does not publish the code for calculating this green index". Is your code publicly available and allows "the news to end good" ;) and maybe even integrated elsewhere?

Area routing is definitely a topic of interest. It looks like it's still a topic of discussion too: https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper/issues/82. Maybe it's something I can help with in the future.

Good point RE the green index calculation. The very least I could do would be to upstream a reference implementation and documentation back to Openrouteservice. I will take care of that.

Super cool... this is definitely a thing I’ll use

Wow, great project. I was working on exactly this in 2015 using Grasshopper but never finished it. I like how much time you invested to solve all the tiny details around the edge cases. Like prefering certain streets, no-hills and trying not to run the same street twice. It wasn’t clear to me from the blog article, does prefer “green” also prefer water areas?

Thanks! Yes, the "greenery" preference also prefers water.

It would be nice if the water preference could be adjusted in preferences perhaps.

Thanks, I'll consider breaking those two things out separately.

Hey Sam, I run ridewithgps.com and have been reaching into the guts of graphhopper to do interesting routing stuff as well. We just silently rolled out popularity based routing, where we used our database of 50mm rides to build a popularity graph which is used to add a popularity weight in routing decisions. Got a long pipeline of other projects coming out in the same space. Drop me a line if you ever want to yack about these things! cullen@ridewithgps.com

Are you guys considering adding in more social features to compete with Strava? It’s seems an excellent opportunity right now with so many people upset with them. A simple UI update showing a feed, add a kudos system... you’re halfway there.

That's actually one of our main focuses over the next two months, along with mapping and routing improvements. We've seen a decent uptick in people migrating, and they are asking for more social stuff. We've always been shy about becoming a social network, so our focus is on making it much easier to connect with people you know, see what they are doing, while making it optional and not pushing it too hard to our existing users.

Reply to my own reply to say, I forgot to mention this is really cool, and a fun use of OSM data I hadn't thought of before. Nice work!

I certainly will, thanks! And congratulations on all your success with Ride with GPS. I'm not really a cyclist, so I only used it for the first time last night, but it looked and worked great for me.

Have you considered creating an option to generate the closest all-nature route (not factoring in walking distance to the running route which you could use as a warm-up)?

Very neat app.

Nice idea - consider it added to the potential todo list for the future. Thanks!

Wow! I tried several different length runs, ever single one _perfectly_ matched some of my favorite routes. Shockingly good.

Thank you for doing this.

For years I've contributed trail data to OpenStreetMap, mostly to support mountain biking, but this is the exact kind of other project it benefits. It was really neat being able to try this on local trails and see just what happens.

One question: What tags does it give priority to?

I ask because I tried it on a local trail system, and it seemed to prefer the wide paved and dirt path as opposed to the mountain bike trail. It was weird in that sometimes it'd use the single track, but in others it'd do sort of an awkward thing through the parking lot / service road (highway=service, service=parking_aisle) then use some of the single track (eg markers 1-2) before jumping on the paved path and pretty much ignoring the single track. The single track is really popular with trail runners in this park, so it got me wondering.

An example of that is here:

https://trailrouter.com/#wps=42.65195,-83.05484%7C42.65088,-...

Thanks for all your contributions to OSM! If you ignore all of the greenery preference then it gives priority to tags:

foot=designated route=root, hiking highway=footway, path, track, bridleway, pedestrian, living_street, residential, service, unclassified maxspeed < 20km/h

Looking at your area (https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/191828180#map=15/42.6423/-...), all of the trails are given equal preference. As a result, it then falls back to whichever gives the shortest path. It's choosing the asphalt one (linked above) just because it's the shortest path. In the future, I may add a surface preference option - so you could give additional preference to non-paved paths.

Thank you very much for explaining that. That makes a lot of sense. I really wish there was a better way for tagging things like narrow/twisty natural surface trails vs. wide flat ones, but that seems all balled up in US vs. EU hiking things, MTB tagging... It's a mess.

(Making it worse, someone naively editing a mountain bike trail in iD will end up inadvertently flagging it as highway=cycleway. And then people using OSM for cycling directions get routed down an MTB trail... Yay.)

I think there might be a bug, check this out: https://imgur.com/a/DXhMWxG

I know for a fact that the second one is about right, because I ran it already. The first one however is somehow showing "shorter" kilometers, by the end it should be about 2.5km. Did I do something wrong?

The first one is an "out-and-back" (so it goes out 2>3>4>5, and then back 5>4>3>2).

Is there any way too see this? Because for both I selected Round trip.

Also the first kilometer seems way too short in comparison to the second

Edit: Wait, the numbers are not every kilometer, right?

There's no easy way to see it at the moment, other than looking at the waypoint list (the box at the top left). One idea I'm looking at is putting arrows on the line - so in this case you'd see arrows going both ways on the line.

And yes, the numbers do not represent km, they represent the numbered waypoints listed in the top left box. Any usability suggestions are very much welcome!

Thanks, yes. I think it would be nice to have some kind of range indication, maybe the waypoints could be letters so they don't get confusing?

And then you can toggle distance measurements.

And for the direction problem, maybe a change of color every kilometer or a gradient? Although that might also be confusing.

Nice job, the algorithm is really effective! I tried this in multiple cities where it ended up recommending very similar routes to some of my established running routes, and even some new combinations :)

Love that your algorithm tries to exclude out-and-backs, I think that goes a long way to make the routes feel organic and appeal to runners. This is really polished and I wish you the best!

One feature suggestion: I wonder if you could have a flag to generate routes starting in parking lots/park entrances in a radius around the starting location. This could go a long way to recommend some common long-run routes where you need to travel a brief distance via car or public transportation but then can get 10-20 miles entirely in the woods.

Thanks! The avoidance of out-and-backs was a must-have for me. It can definitely be improved though. For example, right now the algorithm tries to avoid traversing the same path twice, but it will happily use a path that is only a few metres away! So adding some buffer around that (to penalise paths that are close to one already taken, if not the same) is a future bit of work.

Your suggestion is a nice one. Here in the UK, where it's common to have trains connecting most towns and larger areas, I have thought about adding the ability to say "I want to run 20 miles, and finish at a train station that can get me home in under an hour". Assuming the user is using a car makes it more easily achievable though. Consider it on the todo list!

wait, it avoids out-and-backs? could have fooled me, all the routes it showed for my house were out and backs, some had multiple points of out and back(like a letter Y or E)... i guess thats why i hate running near home, everything is an out and back and even the computer cant find an alternative. :)

It tries to! But if there's no good way to avoid them, then it will end up taking them anyway.

More specifically, when 'avoid repetition' is enabled (it is by default), then the routing algorithm has a very significant penalty weight applied to any existing path already taken.

+1 for the concept of starting in parking lots or trailheads

This project was discussed in the "quarantine side project" mega-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23177351.

Since people were interested, we invited Sam to repost it.

I live in a small town that is getting grown over by suburbia. The routes ignore all the nice open farm fields to the east of me, and runs me down the busiest streets through some of the most dangerous intersections in my entire state, just to skim by the edge of a park in the city.

In that same 6 mile distance, in addition to running past the farms, it could have run me up to the base of the mountains, down the nice bike trail that goes through groves of trees and open field, then back home.

This is one reason I love testing apps like this - my town almost always messes them up.

Would you mind sharing the name of your town? Feel free to email me directly if you wish, contact details are in my profile. It could be that OpenStreetMap data (which I use extensively in the algorithm) isn't very detailed for your area, but I'm keen to investigate further.

I don't mind sharing the town - Spanish Fork, UT 84660

Especially check out the east side of town, it seems like it wants to go into town for anything short of a 15 mile loop, whereas going east is far more natural.

It's not finding any green 'features' in the vicinity (I know, the mountain range off to the east would beg to differ...), so it's falling back to guessing a direction in which to head. I can see that the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest is tagged properly in OpenStreetMap though (https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/3502235), so this should be something I'm able to improve on. Thanks again for your feedback!

Wow, I'm actually impressed by how good the results were, I was not honestly expecting it! Lots of kudos! From the clean map interface and Strava heatmaps to defaulting to metric units, this is something I would even pay for!

Quick anecdote... It defaulted to metric units globally when I first launched it ~8 months ago. But that quickly resulted in complaints from North American users, so it now defaults to imperial units in North America and metric everywhere else. Users can change it in the settings menu, of course.

Thanks for the kind words!

Yes, I was very impressed with the quality of the routes it generates. I live near Muir Woods (north of San Francisco), and it picked some great ones for me.

This is really well done, congrats. I love the level of automation to make it so easy to use. Also the attention to UX, not just in the narrow UI sense but the actual experience of the trail.

Some thoughts: - Create a community out of it so that people can rate the routes, and therefore provide feedback for the algo? - Use some google streetview or alternative for landmarks along the way so people remember what they should be seeing and don't get lost?

UI/UX is most definitely not my forte, so I appreciate the kind words!

Your suggestion RE landmarks tallies with an issue I've been grappling with: how does a user actually run with the route that they've just planned? Yes, you can export the route to a GPX file, and some users will use that on watches/apps to guide them, but it's a bit clunky and isn't the kind of thing you'd necessarily do for a short 5km run in a new area.

I'd rather avoid building full run tracking functionality, as it'd just be repeating what so many other apps do (and often very well). Perhaps the answer is to enable easy syncing of the route to your other apps. Strangely, Strava (the most popular) don't allow importing of routes via their API.

I was think the same thing. The routes generated are really great, but how would I actually use the routes. As some of the routes are pretty complicated. I use an Apple Watch and it would be great to use that.

My preference would be to use Apple Map directions. But it isn’t possible to specify waypoints.

But the official Google Maps URL spec supports specifying waypoints. It would be awesome to click on a link to open the route in Google Maps for turn-by-turn directions.

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/urls/guide#...

Garmin have an import API (I’m just setting it up with cycle.travel). I’ve suggested an “open this URL to get a polyline” intent to the Osmand devs and they’ve built it but I’m not convinced it’s live yet.

Thanks for the tip about Osmand, I'll check that out. If you're referring to the Garmin Connect Courses API (https://www.garmin.com/en-GB/blog/garmin-announces-garmin-co...), that's exactly what I've just got access to and plan to integrate with fairly soon...

Hi Sam, instead of syncing you could hook up the GraphHopper Android navigation demo. Although "app development" is not our focus I really like it to test the routing in real life. And for 2.0 it will be possible to directly have this in the server without a further dependency (see the recent pull request). I've mostly found minor OSM problems in my neighbourhood but also some bugs in GH.

Ah, I see you also have a mobile app. Nice! Is this mainly a mobile version or a native app?

The mobile apps are really just full screen web views, with a few enhancements on top. I will definitely check out the GraphHopper Android project and the recent pull request. An improved native mobile app (possibly even with some offline routing, maybe without some features) would be my ideal endgame.

The Android demo is basically a fork from Mapbox and last year or so they even introduced offline routing (probably via valhalla), but only as a binary blob with a closed source license attached (we forked before so this does not affect us).

btw: are you using CH, LM or plain A* for your setup?

I just had a proper look at GraphHopper Navigation - I can't believe I hadn't seen it before - that looks pretty much perfect for my use case! I will certainly be giving that a try.

I'm using plain A* currently. I understood from the Openrouteservice documentation & code that any time dynamic weights were being used, everything fell back to A* anyway. And I'm using dynamic weights heavily! My understanding could be flawed though, and I appreciate I am going to be a few GraphHopper releases behind now. The speed is okay for now - there's certainly bigger items on my todo list first.

I'm excited to try out GH 1.0 properly. Now that I've got much more familiarity with what I'm doing, I'm keen to switch to using GH directly and somehow try to avoid patching it (or try to get any patches merged back into the open source version).

Love the idea. Great blog posts as well. This one alone https://trailrouter.com/blog/how-trail-router-works/ would have taken you several hours to write!

Hours? I would stress for a day on that! Bravo.

Ha, it makes the same route planning mistake I did years ago when I was in Rome.

I was staying near the Colosseum and for one of my runs, thought I’d run on the Appia Antica, because oldest road in the world, into Parco della Caffarella because it looked like a really nice park with lots of trails.

Well, next thing I know I’m running down a one-way cobblestone road with cars coming toward me and there’s no entrance into the park because there’s a huge wall between the road and the park. The road had walls on both sides in fact. I didn't want to turn around because I’d have the cars to my back. So I hugged that wall as close as I could and trusted the shit out of Roman drivers. Eventually I found a way into the park.

Here’s the route Trail Router gave me:

• https://ibb.co/k8m18xq

Here's the run I did that day:

• https://ibb.co/pK6xqMX

The road starts out looking great:

• https://ibb.co/998GQk3 (my picture)

• https://ibb.co/DYXkBt5 (google maps)

But very soon you're on this:

• https://ibb.co/vJcCSXr (google maps)

Well, it was all worth it because eventually I got into the park and I'm still alive:

• https://ibb.co/52VgT1W

• https://ibb.co/dbvG6f5

• https://ibb.co/ZTPknP3

• https://ibb.co/VWxrwnB

I know you're at the mercy of map data. I don't know how unique this situation is. I always appreciate a new route planning tool. I usually use a combination of Footpath Route Planner, the heat maps from Strava, and Google Maps street view and satellite view. It's definitely a pain to do that for every trip. Maps are definitely not optimized for pedestrian safety, and things like sidewalks and shoulder-width are often inaccurate or just not there on the maps short of bringing up street view.

Thanks for the feedback, appreciated. The reason it suggested that route was (1) the park, as you found, and (2) the Via Francigena hiking route (https://www.viefrancigene.org/en/ & https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6201614) follows this road.

One item for consideration in the future is allowing users to flag unsafe portions of a route and then having that visible to other users (and also influence the algorithm).

Allowing users to flag unsafe portions sounds like a good work-around.

FWIW, I'm looking at the routes it's planning from my home and they aren't safe. It's sending me down heavily trafficked country roads with little to no shoulder. I'll email you some screenshots.

Thanks for the new app regardless!

For anyone else experiencing something similar, try the 'Avoid potentially unsafe roads' option in the settings menu. This tells the routing algorithm to always avoid 'secondary' and 'tertiary' roads without explicit sidewalks (these are OpenStreetMap road classifications).

This isn't on by default because in some countries/regions, such roads are very reasonable to run on.

Clearly there's a better middle ground though, which might involve highlighting potentially problematic parts of the route in the UI.

Thanks again js2 for your email and all your feedback!

Hah, I made the exact same mistake. I didn't realize the park was behind those walls, I assumed that I must had gotten the location all wrong.

This is fantastic. Tried it where I live and the 5km and 10km routes were very similar to where I actually run for those distances, the only major differences being local paths that I know of which are poorly represented in available data.

One improvement I might suggest, it’s not clear if this is being done already, is to not just bias towards greenery, but also boa against main roads. The routes generated for me spent a long time on roads that are quite major, where there are nicer alternatives available.

It seems to work well for my location. I have been living in my current home for six months and I’ve made an effort to plan out greener routes around me for various distances. Trail Router comes up with similar routes when I put those distances in. It’s not perfect – it seems to prefer joining up parks that are long distances away from one another as long as there’s a river along the route instead of joining up parks that are closer together. But it’s a lot better than I expected.

Love the idea especially for when on holidays or in another town! I live I a very green environment and the maps generated are quite often 'wrong', that is not even near the routes I would suggest. Preferring urban areas to non-urban areas and seemingly not knowing of major walking paths in the forests nearby. The Strava map seems to know those paths, but OSM probably doesn't. Anybody know where I can dive deeper in OSM to find out what's going on?

An example: my neighborhood is surrounded by a free laying cycling and walking path. Perhaps diametrically only 30m-100m from houses, but 100% green and rustic. Then the mapper plots a route on sidewalks in urban areas. It did recognize the no. 1 park around though. But I'd hope it would get the woods as well.

Thanks! My suggestion would to start out by checking out your area on openstreetmap.org for two things: Firstly to check to see if the trail you refer to is shown (it should show up as a yellow dashed line if it's a trail). Secondly to see if the woods are shown (this should show in a light green shaded area). Trail Router uses the presence of woods as a hint to prefer paths. Both of these items are surprisingly easy to edit on OSM.

This is great. I move around a lot, and one of the big headaches I always have is figuring out a decent route to run. The only thing I would request is having an option to have completely circular routes, rather then having routes that require running back the way you came.

Looks very nice! Just started out running and especially the feature that it outputs multiple routes of similar lengths (which I can slowly increase) to have some variation is very appealing! From what I can see the routes all look very runnable with a lot of greenery.

I am looking at the route it is generating from my place in New Orleans and comparing it against my own mental route generator for cycling and it’s not doing so well. It’s got me running parallel to Jeff Davis Parkway instead of taking the trail along the very green parkway, then up the side of Bayou St. John with the least greenery (one side has a lot, the other has next to none). Maybe in part because the unofficial desire trails up the green side of the bayou that I regularly see joggers on don’t seem to exist on the map. Going though City Park makes sense; coming back I guess Cortez isn’t too bad a choice if “avoid repetition” is on, but avoiding Jeff Davis just seems super weird.

Pretty neat!

I did see a problem with stairs — not sure if algorithm does not take into consideration or if data is not properly marked up in OpenStreetMap, but locally, it recommended a route goong over two long sets of stairs: one of them being practically a goat trail I would recommend against running on, but careful trodding is ok. The other stairs are long and wide, so probably not perfect for running (hard to figure out your stride), but ok. I wonder if elevation rate could be taken into account, which would probably exclude the goat trail one.

Steps are supported in OSM, but I don't know if your ones in particular are tagged. Either way, Trail Router doesn't consider them by default. If there is a lot of elevation gain/loss when using the stairs, you can adjust the Hill Preference slider (in the settings screen) to indicate whether you prefer hills or would rather avoid them. You can read more about that here: https://trailrouter.com/blog/greenery-and-hills-sliders/

This is awesome! I've tried it on a few areas that I know well, and it really did a good job.

I really love running in new places as a way to explore my area as well as when I travel. I find there is something profoundly good about connecting with my surroundings that way. I use Strava Route Planner with the heatmap extensively, and now I think I'll be consulting this a lot.

My only suggestion is to show an elevation profile. There is already a hill preference slider in the settings, but the elevation profile would really make it great to look at.

You're in luck, both of those things are already supported!

For viewing the elevation profile, click on the little up arrow on the miles/km distance box at the bottom of the screen.

You can configure a hills preference (either to prefer them or to avoid them) in the settings screen. Click on the cog icon to get there. More details are available at https://trailrouter.com/blog/greenery-and-hills-sliders/

this is AMAZING! very fast and planned some interesting routes in Portland that I hadn't thought of. I think i'll start using this over my premium strava route planner

I just loaded this and the map was centered on my house before I gave access to my location. I'm using current Firefox. Anyone know how that would happen?

It uses geoIP data from Maxmind to approximately locate users even before they provide location information. It's not usually _that_ accurate though. It's just intended to get a user to the rough location that they're based in.

As a runner who only runs on trails (e.g. not on pavement) I make a point of asking other runners about places to run before I visit a new town.

I tend to get great advice and the benefit is that I often meet people to follow on Strava, where I build up a library of potential runs.

I’m not looking forward to a future where every conceivable off-road trail is available, instantly, in an app. I doubt anyone who appreciates nature really is.

This is pretty cool, but there are definitely routes that pop up quickly that cross closed gates and trails that are not in good repair. I'd consider these to be good "Beta" routes, if you enjoy exploring and don't mind the occasional dead-end, but not super reliable if your time is limited.

Not a complaint, if I ran these are the sort of routes I'd love to explore.

That's very fair, thanks. In cities I wouldn't consider this to be much of an issue as an occasional dead end (e.g. road works) is easily manually avoided. But in more rural locations it can be frustrating. If you're seeing it in your area, then you could consider submitting a correction to OpenStreetMap. It's surprisingly easy to do. I update Trail Router with the latest OSM data roughly once per month.

This is cool! Strava has a new feature where they'll plan a route for you: give a mileage range and a starting spot. When you tell Strava to prioritize trails vs paved, you get good results. Interesting very similar to yours, so that's really impressive given they're a large company with a big budget, or perhaps it says more about my location.

This is really well done. If you use this, please consider donating. (I'm not affiliated in any way, I just saw on the about page that it's self funded and costs $200/mo). Here's the patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/trailrouter

This is an amazing tool, I just downloaded the app and am excited to use it routinely. Thank you!

AllTrails has a free trail creation tool. Check it out here, you just need to create a free account to save.

https://www.alltrails.com/explore/map/new

Thanks for creating this, just tried it in my local area and it generated a route that I already enjoy !! I shall no doubt get a lot of use out of this, whilst it’s not the intended use - I will cycle a few of the routes over the next few weeks !

This is really fantastic. Thanks for making this!

One suggestion: Have changes to the route push state to the history. That way you can use the back button on the browser if you make a mistake. Right now it'll totally take you off of the page.

Thanks very much! Personally I find it a little annoying if a site pushes state to the history very frequently. If I genuinely want to get off the site I end up clicking back loads, and then go too far!

I tried to solve this in Trail Router by putting an undo button on the screen (bottom right).

I would just follow how Google Maps works. I think that's how my brain was expecting Trail Router to work, since it visually and functionally is very similar to using the "Directions" feature of GMaps.

It’s quite amazing these days there’s enough free data and software available you can create such a tool on your own! How do you plan to make it pay the server costs though?

Fully agreed - the amount of data openly available is astounding. I think many people would be surprised at the richness of the tagging information within OpenStreetMap. Without OpenStreetMap, this project and countless others would not be possible.

Mapping costs would be by far the biggest one. However, I'm very lucky that after the last big spike in traffic, Mapbox very generously admitted me to their community programme. You can read more about that here: https://trailrouter.com/blog/mapbox-community-programme/

The server costs are quite modest at the moment (under $200/mo), which I'm lucky enough to be able to self-fund through my other work. If usage were to massively increase then maybe I'd need to find a way recoup costs. But even all of the hits from HN have barely put a dent in the server utilisation, so there's plenty of headroom for the foreseeable future.

I love to see that you rely a lot on open source. Using OSM instead of gmaps is a big plus in my list. Do you also plan to open source it?

Nice work! I tried it out for my local area and it ended up suggesting some routes that are very similar to my existing runs/rides.

Looks interesting. It missed the multi-use trail that wraps around the area where I live - though its not on google maps either.

It may be that the trail near you isn't on OpenStreetMap (https://openstreetmap.org). If you're interested in fixing that (and thus the myriad of tools that rely on OpenStreetMap data), head to https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Getting_Involved

I tried to generate a 10km round trip route. It generated exactly the same route that I run normally :D

Looks interesting! Have you considered providing a way to sync routes directly to Running watches?

I actually have. Watch this space - there should be direct route syncing to Garmin and Suunto before terribly long. In the meantime, you can export routes to GPX/KML files already.

Wow. As soon as I gave it my location it plotted my favourite local return hike, very cool!

Is there a way to show the elevation associated with a route?

Yes - click on the little up arrow in the mile/km distance box at the bottom of the screen. It will show you elevation, as well as the type of paths taken.

Nice job! Two clicks on my phone and first route was spot on.

very cool! i live close to a forest and it found a trail i had to manually tune on komoot.

feature request: an option to not cross country borders would be nice.

Id want this but for bicycles.

This gonna be a hit!

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