Good electronic source of bike rides?

by philg

Serious cyclists: What is a good source of curated bike routes? In the print world there a lot of books with suggested bike rides. But why lug a book around if you have a mobile phone in a handlebar phone mount? Is there a good source for scenic bike rides, organized by distance and geography, for some of the biking apps? For the fancy Garmin bike computers? Simply to download into Google or Apple Maps?

4 thoughts on “Good electronic source of bike rides?”

  2. Strava segment search and (more recently) heat maps would also be a good choice. The heat maps are pretty interesting. A lot of times people just take the defaults when they go out and ride, and once they learn good/standard routes, they ride them over and over (myself certainly included). As a result the heat map really builds up for popular segments.

    Mapmyride and Strava offer GPX downloads, although personally if I am riding a new route I’ll just print or write out a cue sheet. This takes a few minutes up front but is immune from a number of failure modes I’d rather not think about: battery drain, GPS drift, tree cover, etc.

  3. I second the Strava heatmaps. Also, the Charles River Wheelmen (crw.org) have many of their regional rides posted with links to cue sheets and Ridewithgps.com maps.

    I am a very happy user of the ridewithgps app. Works fine on my ancient iPhone 4s and doesn’t hit me with endless ads (like MapMyRide). Strava tends to be marketed at the competitive rider…lots of challenges and “segments” where riders compete to achieve the fastest times on segments of roads.

    All are free apps, but ridewithgps is less “in your face” about upgrading to the paid version.

  4. All good suggestions, especially the CRW routes, which are great for the Boston area but a a little difficult to read. I also like using Google Maps Bicycle Routing. It takes into account bike paths, elevation changes and car traffic. Available since 2010 (source)

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