kurviger.de caution

(RIP) digger37

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I have ridden regularly between my home and another town in Switzerland for a number of years. Some fast motorway only but also many variations on back roads.

To introduce some new ideas, I planned a curvy route on kurviger.de, exported it as a track to Basecamp then created a route before transferring to NAV V.

It took me through some amazing countryside and villages, some of which I knew but many were new. However, suddenly I find myself on a rutted, gravel track through a forest for 2kms. All OK on the GS but would have preferred to know in advance as it was well laden.

In retrospect I should have been more careful vetting the route and ticking “unpaved roads” as an avoidance in kurviger. That avoidance was set in both BC and the NAV V, which have identical settings. Interestingly kurviger seemed able to override them.

Have replanned this route in kurviger with unpaved avoided and will try it out on my next journey.

Anyone with similar experiences or comments?
 
I dunno...a bloke has a gps for five minutes and tries to come over all expert......

Hope you are ready for 3 weeks time now.......
 
What's wrong with a bit of gravel :D

In all seriousness, it is always an option to just pull over, turn round and not ride through the gravel/river crossing/swamp/atlantic ocean or wherever else a satnav tells you to go :) None of the nav technologies around today are infallible.
 
What's wrong with a bit of gravel :D

In all seriousness, it is always an option to just pull over, turn round and not ride through the gravel/river crossing/swamp/atlantic ocean or wherever else a satnav tells you to go :) None of the nav technologies around today are infallible.

Will buy you a beer in Manhattan
 
I’ve had several similar experiences over the years with Garmin maps, particularly on the standard shortest route. Best one I can remember is going no up a track in Germany across fields until the track ran out all together. My mate, a German resident, stopped mid field for a fag break, shrugged his shoulders, and we discussed our options. On looked more fun than back so we continued in a straightish line until another track appeared. All was well. It usually is;)

The routes aren’t perfect but generally they represent something that is or was there even if it’s fallen into disuse. Adds interest to the day.
 
In retrospect I should have been more careful vetting the route and ticking “unpaved roads” as an avoidance in kurviger. That avoidance was set in both BC and the NAV V, which have identical settings. Interestingly kurviger seemed able to override them.

Anyone with...... comments?

When you export a route (it’s actually a track) created in Kurviger into Garmin’s BaseCamp or Mapsource, Garmin’s software will create a route from it as close to the track as possible, irrespective of your BaseCamp or Mapsource preference settings.

Kurviger does not claim to be perfect. It may well route you down goatracks if that is the best ‘twisty’ road it can find, in preference to taking the rider along the dead straight A whatever.

In short, always check the route being offered up by any software, irrespective of source. Always double check any routes created outside of Garmin software or downloaded over the internet, even those created by your best’est friends.
 
I can confirm it will route you down goat tracks or very unused narrow roads, it did with me last week in spain, who is to blame, well look at it like this, i asked for the route to be plotted to be curvy, i transfered it to basecamp and i sent it to my nav, at no point did i check it, i just took it as it would be ok, it didnt know i was riding a pan european 2 up and fully loaded, i dont know what algorythms it uses to plot a route so maybe i should have checked it, in fact i am the only person to blame for getting stuck on a goat track and having to unload the bike and man handle it back to pointing the oposite way to where we should have been going. You can bet i checked the next route i used from Kurviger. All my fault.
 
leedude, is spot on. The only word I’d change is, ‘may’ from ‘will’ in the opening sentence.
 
We have to accept that errors will occur if we do not check. The detail in kurviger maps, based on OSM, is much better than Garmin's in BC. Garmin should take note and not cover route numbers completely with their magenta. Kurviger manages to make their route lines thinner and translucent so that street names can easily be read.
 
We ended up in a field the other week somewhere in Germany or Austria. Two of the lads had took a turning down a minor side road and I'd waited for the two lads behind so they'd know we'd turned off, while the lads ahead carried on. The minor road became a farm track, which became a gravel track, which led us across some fields and eventually just ran out, leaving us heading downhill through a grassy field. I was honestly hoping that we were on the correct route for the amusement value, since one of the lads up front was on a gixxer thou :D
 
Hi, this is Robin from Kurviger. A user just pointed me to this thread. It's great to hear that you had great rides with Kurviger.

It should be noted, that we try to calculate reasonable routes. We are limited to road data that is often incomplete, so we often have to guess if a road is passable or not. We just allowed a bit more gravel on Kurviger. If you don't like gravel or narrow roads, there are options to avoid them in the advanced options. If you happen to be routed over a road that is not suitable for riding or wasn't avoided properly, then this is usually because the road data is incomplete. The good thing is that OpenStreetMap allows everyone to contribute and improve the road data. We have a documentation about the most important data that is used by Kurviger. If the road data looks correct, but yet the routing does not work, please let us know, it's always possible to improve our routing.

Anyway, I hope you will enjoy rides with Kurviger and find many great roads!

Cheers,
Robin
 
Robin from Kurviger. my post was in no way a slur on your mapping site, just an observation from me and maybe a caution to others,as wapping pointed out in my post it may and not will route you down goat tracks or unsuitable roads for the motorcycle you are on, if it had not been for the torrential rain we had had during the morning i feel sure that even on the pan i could of made the track.
And thank you for taking the time to explain.
 
Robin, thank you for taking a personal interest in your users problems. The fact that BC preferences did not override others was interesting and we now know better. It is to be hoped that more people will be encouraged to explore your route planning potential. Can't imagine other webmasters commenting even if their attention was drawn to a post but this is not the first time you have done so.
 
BaseCamp / Mapsource’s (and indeed a device’s) preference settings will override most things, as that is what they are there for. What they won’t override is the conversion of a track, which is simply A to B, joined together by a vast multitude of invisible tiny dots, the whole going together to create a track, which is then converted - in BaseCamp or Mapsource - into a route, runnable on a Garmin GPS device.

Imagine a track across a featureless desert or ocean. There would be no roads for Garmin to chose in order to obey the owner’s preference settings. It would though create a route, based on nothing more than the invisible trail of dots.
 
Hi, this is Robin from Kurviger. A user just pointed me to this thread. It's great to hear that you had great rides with Kurviger.

It should be noted, that we try to calculate reasonable routes. We are limited to road data that is often incomplete, so we often have to guess if a road is passable or not. We just allowed a bit more gravel on Kurviger. If you don't like gravel or narrow roads, there are options to avoid them in the advanced options. If you happen to be routed over a road that is not suitable for riding or wasn't avoided properly, then this is usually because the road data is incomplete. The good thing is that OpenStreetMap allows everyone to contribute and improve the road data. We have a documentation about the most important data that is used by Kurviger. If the road data looks correct, but yet the routing does not work, please let us know, it's always possible to improve our routing.

Anyway, I hope you will enjoy rides with Kurviger and find many great roads!

Cheers,
Robin

Since finding your mapping site I've used it many times and enjoy a lot of the features. The only one, I can think of at the moment, that I would really like to see added is what can be done on Google maps and Basecamp software which is the "rubber band" effect to drag a route section to modify it.
Do you think this could a future addition?

Thanks again,

Iain
 


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