From the Brochure:
Oregon has been supporting bicycling since 1971 by developing bikeways throughout the state. Thousands of bicyclists enjoy the natural beauty of the Oregon Coast Bike Route annually. For the most part, it follows US Highway 101 as a shoulder bikeway. In several areas, the route departs from the main highway and follows county roads and city streets. These sections are closer to the ocean, are more scenic, and have lower traffic volumes and slower traffic speeds. The total length of the signed bike route is 370 miles (595 km). It can be lengthened to 380 miles (610 km) by taking the alternate Three Capes Scenic Route. On average, most cyclists take six to eight days to tour the coast, by cycling 50 to 65 miles (80 to 105 km) per day. This is a reasonable rate, due to the mountainous nature of the coast: the total rise and fall is close to 16,000 feet (4900 m).
Note: Some alternate routes were used when creating this map. The original map can be seen below.
Oregon Coast Bike Route Map
You may have noticed that the elevation profile wasn’t showing up properly. The path used to calculate the elevation profile was only the last segment of the route. This was a hold over from the last big update where the route length limit was erased. Now the elevation profile is calculated over the course of the entire route.
In itself this update doesn’t really merit a post. I’m making the post because I wanted to point out the limitations of the elevation service. The elevation is calculated from 500 points equally spaced along your route. If the route is short the points are very close and the profile will be very accurate. If the route is long the points will be spread out and the route will be inaccurate.
According to signal detection theory you must sample twice as fast as the signal you are trying to measure. In other words, if you want to find the height of the peak of a hill you will need to take elevations that are separated by only half the width of the peak. So if the peak of the hill is only 50 feet across you will need to take elevation measurements every 25 feet. Given that there are at max 500 elevations taken from a route, that route will be only 2.367 miles long. This example may be a bit extreme but it illustrates how the elevations can be inaccurate.
Keep this in mind when bragging to friends. You can always say the hills were even taller because the app missed the true peak of the hill.
It’s been a long while since I coded something for the site. The other day in Bellingham was pretty cloudy so I started working on getting rid of the waypoint limit. Today I finally updated the site software so there is no longer a limit on the number of waypoints!
I got around the limit by chopping the route into sections and manipulating the sections individually. Prior to this I would recalculate the entire route if anything was changed. This also makes the directions results a bit better. In the prior version the route was calculated all at once and Google’s bike route finding algorithm would sometimes produce weird results. I don’t know why this was happening but I have a feeling that it was some effort to avoid bad streets for riding on and keep a forward direction. Now if you see weird routing going on you can just force the route by adding extra markers.
Even though I got this working really well there is still a couple of big bugs in the program. Most importantly the maps can’t be printed well. It has to do with the way that the map is displayed by the API so I can’t fix the problem. I can convert the printable maps to static images to get around the problem. I may do that, I’m not sure. Secondly adding pages to loop routes is pretty tough. When ever a route crosses out of and back into a page the app has difficulty with that. Especially if the route start and end points are in the page. I’m not sure how I’ll fix that guy but I am aware of the problem.