plotaroute – More Deep Plotting

plotaroute is a deeply functional tool for, err, plotting routes. Earlier in the year, there was a big announcement as they released full integration of routes with Garmin devices.

Today plotaroute adds to their routing toolbox with a few more features, admittedly more incremental updates but nice nevertheless.

Snap Route to Map

Today’s announcement allows you to force a route you’ve previously taken to follow real roads. It tidies up the track and when you save it as a new route (perhaps for someone else) it just better presents what is shown on the rider’s head unit as well as fine-tuning any TBT instructions that are added. It can even help you as, for example, I’ve had many occasions where I’ve downloaded a GPX file for a ride at the weekend only to find it’s a messy track that someone else has ridden and which could be a couple of KMs out over much longer rides.

This sort of functionality is going to be more useful when the original track is relatively bad like in urban areas or in heavily wooded areas.

The snap-to-map functionality adds to the already extensive plotaroute toolkit…shown below. It’s a premium feature.

(smartphone: click the right arrow to see all)