map my ride much worse then advertised

[striker]

Enjoying the beaches with cycling from time to time ,
I have never been there, but i spot one blog post with this guy cycling trip on hawaii:

http://sportypal.com/Workouts/Details/200291

 

[basumarpo1610]

Can't say how accurate it's altitude profiles are, but I would suggest that might be something to do with Google Maps rather than Bikely. GPSies allows you to choose from a variety of map providers so you might find another is more on the money perhaps??


...............??

 

[merckx72]

Never worked for me

Always gets you about 2/3rds through and then screws up. Have not used it in years.

 

[cyclopeon]

the elevation problem

I used MapMyRide to plan a bike tour last summer. At first I trusted the elevation profiles I was getting, but then in the plan for one day's route the profile view showed slopes of 3 to 4% maximum going up a 400m climb. However, I had been told by a friend who had ridden there a few years before that that mountain had slopes to 13% of so on the south side, a pretty huge and significant difference in terms of the time it would take to make the climb and the effort and gearing required. So then I created a new route of only a few km in length, from just before the bottom to just after the top, and this time the profile shown by MapMyRide was very clearly showing 12% grades. Examining the results, it looked to me as though the software breaks whatever route you make into about 40 pieces of roughly equal length, and seems to use only the elevation data at those points when it draws a profile and calculates slopes and total ascent for the route; although all the intermediate data is available to the software, it is just ignored whether for issues of website computing overhead or Internet bandwidth I don't know. So, for anyone using MapMyRide for route planning: if altitudes and gradients matter to you, find out where the hills/mountains are on your route and then make separate little routes through them to find out what the terrain will really be.

Other than that particular nuisance I haven't had problems with it when using a new-ish computer, but with a Windows98 machine it is indeed prone to hanging up, getting confused, or just plain being slower than getting on the bike and riding the route! There is a Beta version of a next release but I haven't tried it yet.

 

[alberto.legstrong]

I used to use gmappedometer. Haven't in about 3 years, so as technology goes, it is ancient, but works nicely.

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/

This was one of the first out there. A lot of guys I know like bikely. I think I tried to use map my ride once and found it laughable at the time compared to gmap pedometer.

There is also a hack that has been out for a while that generates a cue sheet of a google map.

http://www.the-yosts.com/googlemap_cuesheet.html

As far as using it with a garmin edge device, there are probably forums with lots of opinions more informed than mine.

Lately, I just stick to riding roads that I have ridden a zillion times so all of that is more academic than it used to be, to me at least.