Why Bike Routing Apps Get Road Surface Wrong
You plan a ride on a paved cycle path. Three kilometres in, the tarmac turns to loose gravel. Or you plan a gravel ride and the "track" ends in fallen trees. The usual reaction is to blame the app, but the app is almost always reading a gap in the map.
Bike routing apps run on OpenStreetMap
Most cycling route planners, Komoot and BRouter among them, calculate routes on OpenStreetMap (OSM), a map anyone can edit. Every road and path carries tags such as surface, smoothness and tracktype, and the router uses them to decide what is rideable.
Plenty of paths have no surface tag. The router has to guess, usually from the type of road, and it makes the same guess for every rider who passes. It stays wrong until someone edits the tag.
Why wrong surface tags stay wrong
Editing OSM is quick once you know how. Most riders never get that far. You need a separate account and an editor with its own tagging rules, and you learn the surface of a path while riding it, not at a desk.
So riders leave a comment in their planning app instead. A router cannot read comments, and the comment never leaves that app. The next rider gets the same bad route.
How Arana fixes the tag
Arana is a cycling route planner that puts the fix in the same place as the route.
- It shows the tags behind your route. You can see the
surface,smoothnessandtracktypevalues each segment was chosen from, and where a value is missing. A bad route stops being a mystery. - It lets you correct them on the spot. Change a wrong or missing tag in the same view, signed in with your own OpenStreetMap account. The edit goes into OSM, so every router that uses the data benefits, not only ours.
You can plan a route without signing up and download it as a GPX file to ride with whatever device you already use.
Where Arana stands
Arana is built by one person and still in early development. The goal for now is small: a few people who plan routes with it, and at least one OSM edit that would not otherwise have been made.