Longing for a Better Bike Route Tool

Sunday, August 21, 2005, at 10:16AM

By Eric Richardson

My plan is to bike to church again this evening, though this time on a much nicer set of wheels. All of this cycling has made me really wish for a bike routing site that did a few more things than bikemetro does.

For instance, bikemetro tells me that from Runyon Canyon Park to Bel Air Pres there's an elevation change of 89 feet. That sounds nice, until you look at the elevation graph above (note that's just from the top at Runyon... not from Hollywood or Downtown). Yeah, sure, the end (~1300ft) is 89 feet above the beginning (~1200ft), but in between there are drops to about 1000ft and a bunch of 100 - 200ft climbs. I'd love to see the site just add up all the climbs and descents and give you those numbers, along with the overall change.

bikemetro has had some serious downtime issues lately, and I don't really know what their ongoing funding situation is, so it would be great to see someone put together a companion/alternative site. I could even do without any bike specific features in a pinch -- just give me the ability to exclude highways and route based on elevation change (factor flat in against short).