cycling.finial.com

I’m finding this DeLorme TopoUSA thing a bit hard to use. Or at least it is for bikes. There doesn’t seem to be a way of defining a route in a specific, detailed way, or at least the way I want to do it. It’s always redrawing the thing in the “most efficient” way. That is, either “Shortest” or “Quickest”. There’s a “trail” option that doesn’t seem to ever allow me to select it, and a “direct” option which is just a straight line.

What I want is to be able to go along roads for the start and end, yet specify a specific bikepath for the middle parts. That way I can get from my house to, oh, say, Kimball’s Ice Cream via the Minuteman. Roads to the start of the path, path, roads after then end of the path. Simple, yes? It looks as if the only way is to actually draw the whole thing.
I also can’t seem to get the “draw” stuff to work quite right. For example, I drew in the Esplanade bike path and tried to get from my house (near Copley Sq) to the Galleria Mall in Cambridge. To get there, I ride up Dartmouth Street to Back Street, then over the pedestrian crossover of Storrow Drive and onto the Esplanade, which takes me all the way around, past the Hatch Shell, to Leverett Circle (Rt 28). You follow the sidewalk/bike path there to First St and the Galleria. (Or take the Longfellow Bridge across the Charles to First St., either way works).

There doesn’t seem to be a way to do it. When you draw a “new road” the instructions say to make sure to click at least once on the junction points of existing roads so that it knows they’re connected. But if you do that, theh “auto calc”and “Calclulate” route functions always route you back to major roads. Every time I try to connect the Esplanade bike path to an existing road (like McGrath-O’Brien or the Longfellow Bridge) the software puts me on that road and routes me back to Storrow Drive.

I also can’t get it to use the little road I put in over top of the one-way part of Dartmouth Street between Beacon and Back St. (to get the pedestrian ramp). It keeps “automatically” routing me back down Marlboro or something and onto Storrow Drive.

I don’t want Storrow Drive! Why can’t I just tell it which road to use?

I tried plotting out a route from one end to the other of the Minuteman Bikepath. The software knows about the bikepath (if I put start, end or via points on it, it’s labeled correctly) but every single time, it puts me back out on Mass Ave or Route 2 or something.

There has to be a way to do this.

And, yes, I have read the directions.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 14th, 2005 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Code. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.