Navigation, turn-by-turn and offline routing
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Since the routing graph crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, a route in Morocco has known its roads but not its gates: a private gate on a track near Ouarzazate came back as "unknown, not found in OSM". Now it comes back closed, with its OSM node, and the route goes around it.
Yesterday the rider app learned what kind of barrier sits on your route. Today the desktop planner draws the same eight symbols on the route, and a click on any of them — or on any stop — opens its card in the route briefing, beside the map, with the keyboard as welcome as the mouse.
A route across Europe crosses barriers: booms, gates, ticket booths. Until now the app drew almost all of them as the same gate. Now each one says what it is, with its own symbol, and a tap tells you what the mappers wrote about it.
The routing graph used to stop at Tarifa. It now crosses the Strait of Gibraltar and runs down the Atlantic road to Dakar, east along the Sahara to the Nile, and on into Arabia. Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Mauritania and Senegal also come as offline country packs on the phone.
The turn-by-turn map used to hold a single zoom from start to finish. On a bicycle in Bergen that meant a view too far out to read the next junction, and after a glance ahead the map stayed where you left it until you tapped recenter. On the phone, and on CarPlay and Android Auto, the navigation camera now works it out for itself.
Dirt-first routing sends you down forest roads, and forest roads have gates. Most you open and close behind you. Some are padlocked, and the only thing worse than a locked gate 40 km in is one nobody told you about. Routes now carry their gates: drawn on the track, avoided when they are shut, and called out on the way.
Open TET sub-trail I-01 in Sardinia the other way round and the app used to say 14 hours 18 minutes for 169 km. Nobody rides it that slowly. Today the same trail plans at about 6 hours 40 minutes. While you ride, the estimate now learns how fast you actually go, and it remembers that for next time.
This morning's post said any track can now be ridden either way with legal turn-by-turn, built when you import it. For the Trans Euro Trail we went one step further: the server now builds every one of its 331 sub-trails, both directions, in all ten navigation languages, before anyone asks. Opening a TET trail no longer builds anything on the phone, and a country offline pack now carries its trails, so you can import and ride them in airplane mode.
Follow a GPX in the direction it was recorded and the turn-by-turn is good. Follow it the other way and, until today, the line sent you round every roundabout on the empty side of the road. A recorded track is a path, not a route: reversed, it runs against one-way streets, divided carriageways and roundabouts. As of today every imported GPX, TET sub-trail and Library line rides in either direction on a legal route with full turn-by-turn.
Plug the phone into CarPlay or Android Auto and the car screen used to show a map of its own. The route was a thick white line. The basemap ignored your language, POI choices and night mode. The turn arrows on Apple's card were not quite the ones on the phone. As of today the car draws the same map as the phone, and the vehicle marker behaves the way Google Maps taught everyone to expect.