Everytime I look at it in a place I know somewhat well it does include all the nice options for a sunday ride or whatever but it also always shuns more direct routes that are cyclable.

This might be the algorithm giving more weight to greenspace routes but I don’t think it’s that. It’s just data visualitation but in this case this comes with the following problem: nobody but the leisurely sunday-ride people use Gmaps for bicycle navigation in any capacity.

Not knocking that, mind you, but if you’re a “serious” touring cyclist you’d get into at least Komoot pretty quick, maybe even standalone biycle GPS. All the everyday transportation cyclists probably just don’t use GPS for 99% of their routes because they know the way and there’s no point.

Here’s where I think it gets carbrained, a lot of people use Gmaps for their commute because it can dynamically route them around congestion or roadblocks. But these things don’t apply to bicycles, there is never bicycle congestion and even most roadblocks you can usually just ride or walk through on the pedestrian path or something and even removed from that, considering how hostile to cycling much of the world is you probably don’t wanna stray too far from your usual route to just ride along the 6 lane arterial for a while. But they just took the car approach and applied it to bicycle. And sometimes I wonder if people use that as a resource, I mean things like B-Router is deep iceberg cycle pervert shit, and conclude there is no good cycleable route to where they’re going and take the car