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When We Get Komooted
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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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The gamify / social aspect i am personally also not interested in, but the "tracks issue" :)
For example the torino-nice-rallye route is hosted there. Lots of other tracks too that i have been interested in, researching potential routes. Now if i am interested in the track for reference, but don't want to sign up, i'd have to trace the track. They are not necessarily marked routes on OSM.
Interesting. So, if they're not on OpenCycleMap (which is pretty dense AFAICT) then basically we're talking "secret routes", that's the added value. That's roughly what I'd guessed. I don't want to question it too much - after all, you say you get value out of it - but to me it feels to me like a bit of a weak proposition. My usual method is much more basic: I look at the satellite view and see where the trees are! Together with standard OSM data this has served me well enough on both foot and wheels.
I don't know where are you from, so just my perspective from around Europe as I traveled.
In some places like Spain and Portugal the cycling routes aren't developed that much with signage or even half planned, it is bit local. You can get by with OSM OK-ish but I started to look up some of these routes scattered around the web.
In France and Belgium it more depends on the region so sometimes the routes are bit sparse and far away from each other. But the maps were really good for finding these connections between them. Otherwise most official routes are marked with standardized signage.
In CZ you have really dense cycling and hiking route network. It has standardized signage and is managed by 1 organisation since late 1800. So you can get pretty much everything on one place, the "secret" routes are only the different routes you connect together to make your trip. Some long distance routes like ViaCzechia uses the markings and you get the itinerary on the web or you can buy a book.
So it depends I can see why the people use it in some places it is nearly necessary, other places it can be nice to have and somewhere it can just give you an idea where to go but it isn't needed at all.
Interesting anecdotes. If signage is what's important, I agree that's an issue, but surely it's separate. What I don't get is why people are sharing (and paying for!) GPX tracks, i.e. to help them with GPS nav, when you all the information you could possibly need is already publicly available.
It wouldn't be that bad if the routes were at least planned, validated and marked somewhere. By planning in Brouter and OsmAnd I got multiple times spit out in the middle of fields without any route or in front of locked gate. If there would be some routes you can just load in your computer and follow, but no you have to rely a bit on your judgement and map reading skills.
The luxury of Czech routes that can be followed without GPS nav or even paper maps is its own league of map info that is just not available elsewhere. So I really understand why it is appealing to ride or even pay for that info.
OK that makes some sense.
Yes this can be a problem. Uncertainty about road surface is a particular worry. At least once I've found myself basically riding across a field, when a it was marked as a dirt track. The locked-gate issue is even more problematic tho in practice I think I've never actually had it. More usually I'm surprised by how accurate the data is - and find myself wondering who it was who went to the trouble of doing it, and feeling grateful to them!
And of course that's the point about OSM data, IMO: if it's bad or wrong, ideally we should be fixing it rather than taking the consumer mindset and jumping ship to a paid product.
This seems to suggest that Czech navigation data is rights-protected, maybe by the national maps agency. I've heard that can be a problem. Again, it seems to me to be political problem to be fixed. But I get why you'd want to just have the best data available.
Yes, it is problem in osm data but that doesn't mean that there aren't people that just want something to work, the komoot atd makes it quite easy to see where people have gone and should be passable. And unfortunately most people have the consumer mindset about this.
Yeah the Czech touristic club is bit bitchey about that data and gives it only to the Czech equivalent to Google (seznam) but all of it is still in OSM. The paper maps are made by few companies and they are bit pricey too but I wouldn't tell that the data are looked down. There are some people trying to get it fixed (to be officially added to osm).