Why is my cycle route not sticking to the path?

Hello fellow cartographiles,

First post, trying to get more into the machinery behind this amazing mapping tool.

I’m attempting to plan a route going along a section of national cycle route 21 (southern England) but it isn’t working, even when I try to manually waypoint all the way along. The site I’m routing on is ‘openrouteservice.org’. Anyway, I figure it could be that the path hasn’t been set up as being navigable by bike so I take a look on the OSM site but not really sure what I’m looking for - the pieces of path I click on seem to have the correct assertions and tags unless i’m missing something.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

Can anyone with a spare moment take a look and let me know what’s going on??

Thank you! M

Misread post please disregard.

You may well get better results with specialist cycle routers. For instance cycle.travel seems to always use the Sustrans network.

Look at this example: http://cycle.travel/map?from=East%20Grinstead&to=Crawley&fromLL=51.1322179,-0.0117661&toLL=51.1103444,-0.1801094

Fair point, must be a limitation on the openrouteservice website then I guess, I’ll message the developer and start using the cycle.travel site instead - thanks for your help, SK53!

The paths openrouteservice avoids are tagged as bridleway with bicycles allowed. It could be that opernrouteservice favors a proper highway over a bridleway or ignores the bicycle allowed tag completely on bridleways which in some countries are open to horse riding only.

Ah, I see. My main aim with this topic was to make sure the OSM data was correct and, if it wasn’t, help to amend it. If it is certainly a problem on openrouteservice’s part then I am satisfied. I have already messaged the developer (but have yet to receive a reply). By the way, I cycled this route yesterday and the path is lovely and very suitable for cycling if anyone is near the Worth Way. Thanks again for the help!

Yes, ORS is likely to follow German conventions for bridleways rather than UK ones. Cycle.travel is optimised not only for touring routes but for the vagaries of OSM tagging in different countries.