Exceptional Map Update – Improved Autorouting.

Okay after the last mountainbike maps suffered from severe breakage of autorouting over longer distances, I push through new maps tonight. Switzerland, Austrian and Italy are already updated, other maps follow suit.

Just a reminder:

Using the “avoid toll roads” option in your GPS/Mapsource you switch to bicycle mode. I don’t recommend setting any other avoidances! Bicyclemode omits footways where bicycles are not allowed and skips tracks with tracktype=grade3 or bigger. (of course also any way with mtb:scale=1 or higher is skipped or mtb:scale:uphill=3 or higher, also sac_scale prohibits bicycle usage in bicycle “avoid toll roads”). In German this is option is called “Mautstraßen vermeiden”

You can play around which mode setting (default and proved working quite well is car/motorcycle) gives you best results. Oneway streets are not yet included because setting the rules in mkgmap is a bit buggy. In Mapsource there is no big difference between the modes. Once oneway streets are implemented you will be able to avoid them using the pedestrian setting. I will only implement oneway rules for primary/secondary/tertiary streets because usually in town I am quicker disrespecting oneway and often bicycles are allowed to go against the direction anyhow (this is not easily implementable […]

About the upcoming map updates

Well thanks to Qlandkarte GT it is now possible to view even more information from OSM on your computer screen. I will add tracktype and sac:scale information to the Openmtbmaps. There is one catch. While the additional information will be displayed on most GPS units (at least on Vista HCx and 60CSx) – it will not be shown in Mapsource.

Qlandkarte GT however will display the Overlays. Note that because I don’t want to increase the tile number too much tracktype will only be shown outside of tunnels and bridges (here you should not need tracktype anyhow). And sac:scale will be shown in preference to oneway streets (an unlikely combination too).

Installation of Qlandkarte GT in Ubuntu x64 did run very smooth BTW – took me bout 15 minutes. For instructions read on here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin/QLandkarte

While I got Qlandkarte GT running on Windows XP 32bit after the hassle of adding gdal to system path (I used the free tool Redmond Path for this as for all of the progs I have to add to Win system path) which is not done in standard installation (Qlandkarte complained on startup that gdal.fw cannot be found), I have not yet suceeded in Windows […]