Peter, I dont use carpool lanes. Garmin selected carpool lanes avoidance by default on the bicycle activity profile.
The nasty thing is that this has an impact on osm routing.
If you select carpool lane avoidance, all roads with access=no are blocked. Even if they have bicycle=yes (Basecamp is ignoring this tag). So Im not happy with this routing and I have to tell my users to use the activity for cars instead.
Roads tagged with motorcar=no are blocked too in this mode. So this means all bike paths in the default mkgmap settings which has motorcar=no by default (or access=no, bicycle=yes) are unaccessible in the Basecamp bike activity settings.
If you make a map for car users, you can benefit from these settings. Selecting carpool avoidance on can block all roads that are not intended for car driving (bikepaths, footways etc). However, selecting of carpool avoidance seems to mess up the routing in Mapsource, so you have to make several maps, one for Basecamp and the newer firmwares, one for Mapsource and the older firmwares.
Thanks for that explanation, I’m starting to understand now. You have obviously done your homework. I haven’t worked much with BC, it’s too cumbersome for me to use with track editing and gobbles memory like crazy.
Using a motorbike ferry in Thailand I have verified what you wrote. Indeed, routing now only works with a custom profile and carpool lanes deselected. Of course, there is no Garmin tag access=no. There is “no cars/motorbikes” instead. This shouldn’t have any effect on bike routing and would be a bug - if we were talking about a map produced by Garmin. However, I have seen them respond to such bug reports for third-party maps and they may fix it. Have you reported it in the Basecamp forum?
Getting back to the original topic: none of this should stop us from proceeding with an improved style sheet and typ file. Perhaps we could create a style sheet that could easily be adopted for various vehicle types by changing a variable?
I would dearly love to compile my own map of Thailand with it, but I can’t see any way of getting at the OSM data. The existing extracts are either too big, faulty and / or too old.
It seems like it’s easy to put data into OSM, but it’s almost impossible to get something useful out of it at this point in time. I haven’t even been able to find an easy way to print a scale map of a province.
I have reported it but of course they ignored it because it doesnt affect their own maps.
I guess we have to deal with it and adapt the default mkgmap styles. I already did that for my Openfietsmap but it gets very complicated to explain the users how the set the routing properly given the differences in routing between Mapsource/older firmware vs Basecamp/newer firmware.
Regarding to your Thailand map, can’t you just grab an asia.osm.pbf from the geofabrik site, and extract a rectangle around Thailand from it with osmconvert?
This works for me very well with the benelux: osmconvert europe.osm.pbf -b=2.35,49.35,7.5,54 -o=benelux.osm.pbf
I saw something just now in the latest beta 4. Perhaps it will make changing the routing options a little easier. In the end, however, the end is inevitable: Garmin moves on and since they will make sure that nobody can crack the NT format this time round the map making community will be left behind and forced to move to an open platform. I tried OSM on my Android phone, but the GPSr is pathetic.
I probably can use the geofabrik extract now, seeing that our ISP has upgraded us from 10 to 50 GB/month for free. We used to run over our data cap almost every month… I’ll give it a go and run the latest files from our project and mkgmak to see what comes out.
Thanks very much, Willi! Did you produce this from the geofabrik extract?
Last night I found yet another solution. After installing the mirror download plugin I can now download large areas in one go, and fast. (From Russia with love) Now I have central Thailand, about 180 MB and I’m trying to figure out all the error messages mkgmap throws me.
Ok, I have now compiled my map. Routing works and I’m pretty happy with what I see so far.
One thing I would like to change, although not everyone will agree with me: any road (no matter how big) that is marked with an unpaved surface should be shown as such. This means displaying it as a track. Route Class and Speed Limit should be preserved, according to road classification.
The test map is available for download.
There is no address search, but POI search works. Feedback in this forum is appreciated. We hope to have these modifications incorporated into Lambertus’ service in the future.
As written here I’m downloading Thailand data from time to time directly to check my mapping.
I wouldn’t display all unpaved roads as tracks. There are also paved tracks. I think doing it like Rendering of MTB maps on Garmin units would be better.
Thanks again. I have no idea how the mtb people get their maps to look the way they do. I don’t think having multi-coloured roads is a good idea, the lines will get too thick and clutter up the map. Minko somehow managed to make bridges appear thicker, which looks good at some zoom levels, but as you zoom in they disappear and as you zoom out they ‘detach’ from the road they mark.
To me as a motorcycle traveller it is important that I can see whether a road is paved or not. In fact, this info is probably more important than any other. For a car driver this may be less important. That, and the fact that Garmin maps (non-NT) don’t distinguish between cars and bikes signals to me that we need a separate motorcycle map. Or perhaps we could abuse the taxi restriction that is not used by anybody?
About address search, this uses administrative districts, I dont know how this in Thailand works. See --location-autofill and --bounds=directory in the mkgmap options
Regarding bridges: yes I use only one linetype with fixed pixel distance which has those issues. Maybe you can make more linetypes for every zoomlevel: resolution 24 a wider one, resolution 22 a more narrow bridge. Besides, I dont know if Garmin has more zoomlevels than mkgmap can show.
Taxi restrictions doesnt work on most Garmin units afaik
This map is more of a proof that it works in the details that we worked on, so the probs with addresses and sea don’t bother me at this stage. When Lambertus incorporates it I’m sure this will all be sorted.
I did a little testing and so far it seems that the ‘no cars/motorcycles’ restriction in Garmin maps doesn’t work for anything other than walkways. As I couldn’t find any roads on our NZOpenGPS maps with car restrictions I used the ferries from Auckland to Waiheke Island. The results:
In MS everything gets routed via the passenger ferry.
In BC cars go on the passenger ferry, bicycles get sent on a long detour via the car ferry. (Unless car pool avoidance is turned off.)
What we need now is a location on an official Garmin NT map, where we could test these restrictions. I.e., for a road where cars are not allowed, will bikes get routed through there? (I only have US maps and I don’t know where to find such a location.)
I couldnt tested this on the latest maps, I only have an older CN Europe. As far as I can see, for Garmin bicycles DON’T exist so they are treated the same as cars
You have either pedestrians or cars, nothing in between. I dont even think that they have a specific pedestrian routing, its only a switch car=yes / no. If it is no, only pedestrians can route on them, not even bicycles. Bicycles are routed the same as cars.
Now the challenge is, can we find the code what blocks car traffic from certain roads? It is clearly not motorcar=no or access=no because this tag doesnt work in BC (unless you switch carpool avoidance on)
It doesn’t matter if the map is old. You just need to know a street where cars are not allowed to test the restriction. As far as I can tell so far in non-NT maps car restrictions only work on walkways. In our NZ maps we disconnect roads where cars are not allowed. Malls have to be mapped as walkways.
Ah, yes, I assumed the ‘world’ would be the style I needed. I’ll change to ‘world-test’ asap. Unfortunately an update is already running and I cannot run two updates at the same time.
