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What are your favourite regional online websites or blogs relating to mapping or routing that you find useful and accurate.

See also: What are the most useful or interesting cycling-related websites or blogs?

Please vote up or down based on the accuracy/usability of these services and post one website link at a time.

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7 Answers 7

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CycleStreets

CycleStreets is a UK-wide cycle journey planner system, which lets you plan routes from A to B by bike. It is designed by cyclists, for cyclists, and caters for the needs of both confident and less confident cyclists.

The service looks to be free, however, funding issues are causing the site's development to be slow, and they accept donations.

The site is currently in beta, and has gaps in coverage. There's an iPhone app for the site, and an Android app was in development last year.

The most useful feature, the Journey planner provides information you would normally get from any free mapping service, turn-by-turn directions, journey time and distance.

It also gauges the quietness of the route based on how much of the journey is based on cycle paths and roads, provides an elevation profile and the ability to import your journey to Google Earth or export it to a GPS device

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  • Took some of this from the earlier, more general thread to get this started. This could use some attention from anyone who's used this site. Maybe a short summary of strengths and weaknesses would help. For example, how's coverage now? Do they respond well to reports of mapping inaccuracies? May 24, 2011 at 15:33
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Sustrans

Sustrans has created a network of 12,600 miles of walking and cycling routes across the UK. This includes a mixture of quiet lanes, on-road routes and traffic-free paths that are often a great way to get to work, school, the shops or just for exercise and fun. The Network is available to everyone and passes within a mile of 57% of the population.

If you live in the UK you can order a free information pack which includes a map of national cycle routes for your area and a leaflet for making the most out of your bike.

Sustrans created the National Cycle Network.

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InstaMapper

There's a site which I use to save my routes, then share them, called instamapper that I use extensively. It also allows people to log into it and follow you in real time; I used this to let my wife know when to run me a cold bath after a very long ride!

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    Please submit one at a time. I use InstaMapper for tracking my dog walks with my iPhone. It relies heavily on a decent GPS signal for good results.
    – Ambo100
    May 27, 2011 at 12:09
  • @Ambo100 - This is CW, feel free to edit. May 31, 2011 at 23:07
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Bike Route Toaster

I really like Bike Route Toaster it does the job just fine regarding to mapping and allow to upload it directly to your Garmin, and that's all for free.

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MapMyRIDE

mapmyride.com has some UK coverage and is acceptably fast, but some features require membership (like printing cue sheets), and the interface is convoluted. Ads on the site can be intrusive.

Unlike other UK mapping services, routes must be generated manually and can take some time to make. It even has trouble with recognizing National Cycle Routes.

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A quick Google search turned up some decent results that are presented below.

Cycle-Routes: Seems to give a good overview of the routes that exist, but doesn't seem to give a point to point route. Could be good if you want the general overview of the area to plan your own route, but I usually look for a point to point route.
http://www.cycle-route.com/

Cycle Routes UK (different site similar name): Gives route information filtered by area, distance, path type, and difficulty. Again, it is not point to point, but if you are looking for good routes to exercise or time trial against it seems like a good source. You can even add routes that you know about that aren't in the system and help others. If you are looking for predefined and tested routes this would work nicely.
http://www.cycleroutesuk.com/

Personally I use Google Maps with the bicycle directions option, but I am usually looking for commuting routes not exercise routes.

Cheers!

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Bikely

Based on Google Maps, the site is geared towards user-contributed routes. While there is a good amount of content here covering the UK, bikely.com is slow and hard to use.

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