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Why Use VeloMap maps for cycling?

  • High Contrast layout optimized for small size screen of Garmin GPS (1.8-4"). Clear differentiation between all street types. Separate low contrast Layout for tour planning on your PC/desktop.

  • Paved or Unpaved? Easy to spot road type. Bridges and tunnels shown. Cycle tracks and cycle lanes shown. Arrows for one way streets…… See the map legend for more.

  • Cycle relevant information like drinking water, city bike stations or bicycle shops searchable and shown prominently.

  • Cycle routes shown prominently BESIDES the streets differentiated by colour and size based on importance (other maps show cycle routes instead of streets so that you don't know what kind of street the route is on, bad for planning).

  • Navigation – Highly sophisticated Autorouting specialised for cycling. Don't cycle on big streets anymore because you got lost. The VeloMap focuses very strictly on road cycling, commuting and touring/trekking. Maps trying to focus for many purposes can never be as good.

  • Easy installation to Garmin Mapsource, Garmin Basecamp or Qlandkarte GT for on PC planning.

  • Good Documentation because everything you want and need to know for using the maps is found on VeloMap.org

  • Contourlines based on the best free (as in beer) data – viewfinderpanoramas.org – as separate download for most countries. Much higher quality in mountainous regions than the mostly used void filled SRTM3".

  • Map Incomplete? You can participate and Add missing to Openstreetmap. Every Week the maps become better and more complete! If you think anything "bicycle relevant" features are missing (but recorded and documented in OSM), drop a comment and I will try to add it.


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Lots of information, don't get lost, Get Started!

 

Navigation – Find the shortest nice route — or find the most cyclefriendly route.

Garmin offerst two seperate Autorouting modes supported by all GPS and Software. Shorter Distance will actually be shorter than on any other Garmin map I have tried (even though high traffic streets are avoided). Faster time finds nicer routes with even less traffic and makes some detours if needed.

Autorouting using  Mapsource 6.16 or Basecamp v3 up to 200km trip distance without via-points. Around 100-150km with Oregon/Dakota/2010_Generation_etrex/GPSmaps. If you route over longer distances, cities are avoided except for cycleroutes crossing cities.

 

Map Layout

Clean map layout 100% optimized for readability on GPS. Be assured that on the GPS maps therefore are very well readable. As for desktop use the layout has too much contrast, there is a second layout optimized for planning with Mapsource/Basecamp/Qlandkarte GT.

 

 

You can Improve the Maps!!

These maps are based on the freely available wikipedia like Openstreetmap Map Database. You should consider uploading your GPS tracks to openstreetmap and/or help out if you find errors or missing data.  There is a short introduction here listing the most relevant links to get you startet: Participate

 

Who can make use of the maps?

The maps offered here are of course, currently primarily used by Garmin GPS users, but you don't need to have a Garmin GPS to use them. Qlandkarte GT an opensource and freely available Map Viewer can display them in all their pride, and also if not owning a Garmin GPS or buying maps from Garmin you can install the free Garmin Basecamp or Mapsource software and enjoy autorouting like you have not enjoyed before.

 

Need a map for Mountainbiking or Hiking?

Head over to http://openmtbmap.org and get it. Whereas the Velomap showss non paved tracks and trails in very subtle colors, on the openmtbmap you can see difficulty gradings both for Up- and Downhill. Also mtb and hikingroutes are prominently shown.

 

7. April – last CCBYSA 2.0 Map Updates

Well so after a few weeks without notices here comes a big update and notice. As this update will be the last one that is based on CCBYSA 2.0 data (acutally the same data as last week) I have put a lot of effort in creating maps with as few errors as possible, and best usability.

 

Contourlines now Worldwide Available:

There are now contourlines for: Slovenia, Ukraine, Turkey, Estonia, Hungary, Croatia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Serbia, Cyprus, Malta, Isle_of_Man, Azores, Faroe_Islands, Liechtenstein, Andorra, Monacco and Macedonia.

And outside Europe: Iceland, Morocco, Madagascar, Israel and Palestine.

 

I'll still add over the folowing days contourlines for Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina inside Europe (then all Europe country maps have contourlines) and Somalia, Libya, Tanzania for Africa.

 

Well and my longtime goal was to provide contourlines for the whole world and with the above list only one big country/continent is missing. Namely Asia. But even with 25m intervals instead of 20m intervals, the full Asia contourlines amount to a whopping 9.4GB or 6GB 7zipped ( get it here ) , but will not integrate it into the map of Asia. You can of course install it into Mapsource/Basecamp/Qlandkarte GT and select areas out of it that you need. Just be careful not to select too much (4GB max size problem, 2000 tiles max on your GPS problem – as Asia contourlines complete is 1160 tiles). There is no installer and I assume if you want to use it, you know how to use them (tdb and overview img are of course included).

Next week I'll upload Asia in three parts (31-80°; 80-130° and 130-180°) so size/download is smaller. Of course this will also not be integrated.

 

I'm also heavily working on removing the few bugs remaining in Austria/Germany (and consequently Alps) contourlines. For France this is done already so the contourlines of France for this update have to errors less.

 

 

Other Improvements:

I spend quite a lot of time to iron out errors, especially on the address search (e.g. address search in Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen or Wien should work now as expected). So address search should work better on all Europe country maps. Also I used a european coastline file, so sea has less holes (and I hope no flooding at all). I too again went through most used keys for natural and landuse, and included some common misspellings and some new values. Other things I added were some more food values (e.g. swabian food), natural=col/natural=saddle and scenic=yes for autorouting priority.

Well and also other errors have been corrected over the last few weeks (e.g. up to middle of March, if you selected to include a contourlines only map, but not integrate the contourlines into the map, the contourlines only map would be blank and other small annoyances). Also some improvements to the Desktop layout were done and I did further work on the naming of skislopes and included big skislopes also again into the Velomap.

 

BTW: many European countries have by now already very very good coverage. In quality OSM maps have always been great, but also in data quantity in many countries second to last generation of Garmin maps have been overtaken. E.g. Austria is 225MB now including contourlines, vs the best Austrian map of Garmin (Topo Österreich 1.11) at only 170MB – as the newest Topo Austria is including so much junk data that it became unusable. Even with autorouting data excluded at 179MB, the Openmtbmap Austria is still bigger than the Topo Austria 1.11. Also Germany with currently 1.3GB is approaching the 1.55GB of the Topo Germany v2/v3 (which is more or less identical if the Digital Elevation Model is taken out). France is similar and in the BeNeLux the quantity of OSM data is anyhow mostly superior to any other topo maps.

 

Oh yeah, and I haven't forgotten the promised tutorial videos. They will come pretty soon….

 

 

Future Updates under Odbl:

Well now the change to Odbl data is more and more complete. Soon Geofabrik should go online with "cleaned" new data. As there will be many many holes and data quality at least for the first few month degraded, I will leave the CCBYSA maps of tomorrow online for the next 3-12month (depending on the country, if needed longer). If There is a chance to get country extracts of CCBYSA 2.0 from FOSM I will use that data to update the CCBYSA 2.0 maps sporadically also in future.

In order for you to find the separate maps, as soon as I have rendered odbl compatible maps, I will setup a new download page dedicated to odbl based Openmtmaps/Velomaps. I excpect this to happen next week.

 

 

Incompatibility of Velomap and Openmtbmap on newer GPS devices if same country is sent both times including contourlines

Please note, as there were quite a few people reporting errors, I assume that this is due to sending both the velomap and the openmtbmap of the same country both times including contourlines.

 

 

Please Support Openmtbmap and Velomap by Donating some coins…

As it's a lot of work to run Openmtbmap and Velomap, and keep everything up to date and up to best possible technology, I ask you to donate some coins toward it if you haven't done so yet. Simply donate a bit after your next install of openmtbmap/velomap when you see the donation page. For people who already donated money, and want to prolong their account I'll soon set up a separate page for them. Also you will be reminded to stock up by email before your account expires and instructions on how to prolong it (7-14 days before it runs out).

Velomap Down 09.01.2012

Hi Everyone. Just a quick note. Today my server crashed badly when upgrading opensuse from 11.4 to 12.1 (actually the whole /boot folder and other folders/data got reset or deleted). I spent most of today playing in backups and most things are up again. Note however that it is possible that some countries tomorrow may not be downloadable (especially velomap). Also possible map of Europe will be missing – other premium maps (north America..) will be available however.

Hallo allerseits, eine kurze Notiz.. Mir ist heute der Server gecrashed, und openmtbmap/velomap waren down. Ich hab den Server neu aufsetzen müssen // backups einspielen und die Website sollte inzwischen wieder (fast) vollständig funktionieren. Evtl werden die Kartendownloads (insbesondere Velomap) Morgen nicht online sein. Europa Premium Download könnte Morgen auch down sein, die Nordamerikakarten und andere sind dagegen schon wieder online.