Ride with GPS: Bike Navigation

We travel the US and are often wondering where to ride. Ride with GPS has connected us with many wonderful rides.

This has unusable routes that cross through restricted private property and or habitat conservation lands causing riders to trespass.

It doesn’t work often

They lie about one week free trial. I used it once and canceled subscription the next day. 4 days later, they charged me for a months subscription. No ethics or morals anymore.

I really liked Ride with GPS at first. But I ran into some issues using the voice turn by turn navigation. Sometimes it would announce the wrong turn, at the wrong location or on the wrong side of the road. Im sure there was some user error there but more than once I found myself on the wrong road and needing to turn around. Maybe it was some delay in announcing turns? Regardless I’ll look for an alternative until that issue is fixed.

This is not intuitive.

Great for cyclists and hiking or running. Love how you can plan your own routes or find other people’s.

I just started riding again, mostly for pleasure, with the added bonus of running a few quick errands throughout the week. All of my biking is on city streets in a modestly busy city, at least in terms of traffic. This can be difficult at times, especially in area where sideshows and lack of traffic enforcement have become the standard. Therefore, avoiding some of the main streets is not so much an option as it is a necessity if you plan on arriving home alive. This app has been especially helpful when planning out rides to the grocery store, or just for fun, as it tracks all the data I find beneficial, while providing an easy route planner and tracker. For the most part, it’s rather easy to navigate through the app, however, there is definitely room for improvement. Added unexpected bonus was the social media/app community aspect, which allows you to setup a profile to connect with other bikers in your area, publish/share routes and pictures, etc. As of now, there’s not much participation, but I’m hopeful with time, and some app updates, this could grow into an amazing app and community.

I’ve tried creating multiple custom routes on each of Strava, Garmin Express, Garmin Connect, Komoot, and Google Maps with mapstogpx. Ride with GPS is by far the best for road, gravel, and MTB. The RWGPS maps are the most comprehensive and offer multiple alternative maps and views, including topographic maps with the ability to switch between them on the fly. When one map doesn’t give me what I want or hasn’t been updated, I can switch to another which gives me the route I want. The app shows the grade through the whole route and has the best elevation view. It also requires the least manual routing, doing a great job of picking the best biking route (avoiding busy roads and steep ascents) rather than just the shortest. It integrates well with Garmin Edge and it’s soooo easy to transfer routes through Garmin Connect. The best part is the great integration between the app and the web interface, ridewithgps.com. That is also the most powerful and easiest to use web-based route planner out there and a great complement to the app. Like the app, it also integrates multiple map sources, including Google Maps with Google Street View and the ability to open Google Maps from the RWGPS interface. The Google Maps integration is soooooo useful in so many ways. The heat maps in the web interface are especially useful when trying to figure out if that dirt track is actually bikeable or just an overgrown farm/forest track. My only ask is to integrate with Trailforks. I’d pay extra for that. Thanks for developing such an awesome powerful tool!!!!

Works well with Garmin and Strava. It actually provides a bit more comprehensive data. Well designed.