Add stop time at waypoint

[Tim Goodman]

If planning a route on which you want to add stop time (say visit a museum etc) how can this be added to route timings

[Hans van de Ven MR.MRA]

@Tim-Goodman
Hallo Tim, that is not possible at this time

[stephen davies]

This feature will be very useful for when we start riding Electric Bikes long distances. Adding in the time to charge would be perfect.

[Nick Carthew]

@stephen-davies That would mean we would become clock watchers I never have been and never will be a clock watcher. Electric bikes capable of touring are a long long way off. No need to panic just yet. phew

[Guzzist]

Good Idea. Garmins BaseCamp is able to do this.
As tour guide you need to be a clock watcher...

I'm using also eCars and eBikes in several scale. Also for long distance rides. Surely, you need to plan this ride with charging breaks. But it's really not a problem, I'm familiar (it's similar) to do the same by traveling by train. There you should have also a plan in front of traveling.

So, age of electric rides is there. But MRA is far away to do the same as specialized route planning tools for eMobiles.

[Nick Carthew]

I have never needed to add stop times to a route. If the route travels through a great landscape I will mentally add an extra hour or two to allow for stops to take photo’s. You can’t plan too precisely for a museum stop - the museum might be really good or it could be a pile of poo! So the stop might be 1.5 hours or 10 minutes. What if the restaurant you use for lunch gets your order wrong and the service takes an extra 20 minutes!
Last year in May, I lead a tour of 4 bikes 4500 miles through Europe over 21 days. Every route for every day was meticulously planned using MRA. From fuel and coffee stops to ferries and hotels. We had some issues along the way that cannot be planned for; like a bike breaking down. We dealt with this by adjusting some routes during the tour by logging on to my MRA account and uploading new routes to my TomTom via the cloud.
At no point during this or any of the many other tours that I have lead, would a tool to add stop times to a route have been useful. Experience is the best tool in the box!

[Gary France]

I’d like to add my opinion on the need for adding a layover time at a waypoint.

As a motorcycle tour operator with quite a lot of experience of planning and leading rides (about 100 days riding per year) I believe it is essential to be able to add time to a waypoint that you are using for a coffee break / lunch stop / museum visit etc. This is not for use during the actual ride, but for planning that days ride. I need to be able to check my planned route and all of its stop points get the group to the hotel where we will be staying at the end of each day at the right time. Importantly, such a facility will also allow me to check what time we will arrive for a booked lunch etc. In my job, being able to do this is absolutely essential. As Guzzist says “As a tour guide you need to be a clock watcher.”

To give you some idea of the complexity of the number of rides I plan, take a look at this webpage, where I have simply taken some screenshots from Basecamp to illustrate how many tours I have planned. www.tour1.com/mra-example Trying to do that many without proper time planning would be crazy.

What is worth mentioning is it would be perfectly okay if MRA introduced timed stop point just in the app software so people can be certain their planned ride woks well. That is the essential bit. I can see that then transferring that data into a gpx format to load into a gps unit is way more complicated and I think, somewhat un-necessary. Basecamp does that now – you can check you time planning on your computer, but that time information does not transfer via the gpx file. That is perfectly okay, as for as Nick Carthew says, things happen during the day that slightly change your timing anyway and providing you know how long you planned for (say) a lunch stop or a coffee stop, and you stick to that during the ride, you don’t need to be that accurate.

As a Basecamp user for ten years, I have a lot of time invested in that software and so changing to MRA and transferring my existing routes over would mean a huge amount of work. From my trial of MRA over the past few days, I am very happy with the way it works, how you plan routes, load in a GPS unit and the subsequent use on the road. I have done all of these things easily in the last few days. MRA ticks many of the boxes. But, not being able to add stop time to waypoints is a huge problem for me. I can see why some people (Nick Carthew for example) don’t feel the need for this, but I most certainly do. Trying to ‘wing-it’ on 100 days of riding each year just won’t work.

Basecamp has many drawbacks: it is clunky, has a rubbish search facility and has a terrible user interface. But, but until I know that MRA includes stop times to Waypoints, switching will likely cause as many issues for me than it solves. For me, Basecamp still does everything I need, including timed stop points.

Keep up the good work MRA, you seem to have a winner for most people. I will likely use MRA for simpler rides in order to keep an eye on developments. Hopefully, one day soon MRA will include timed stop point sand that is the day I will switch to using MRA.

[Drabslab]

@Gary-France

I fully support your request. I use MRA as well to organise, from the comfort of my big screen PC, all trips for a weeks holiday or travelling.

Being able to calculte stop times at a point of interest would be big plus :-:+1:

[Hans van de Ven MR.MRA]

@Gary-France said in Add stop time at waypoint:

I’d like to add my opinion on the need for adding a layover time at a waypoint.
As a motorcycle tour operator with quite a lot of experience of planning and leading rides (about 100 days riding per year) I believe it is essential to be able to add time to a waypoint that you are using for a coffee break / lunch stop / museum visit etc. This is not for use during the actual ride, but for planning that days ride. I need to be able to check my planned route and all of its stop points get the group to the hotel where we will be staying at the end of each day at the right time. Importantly, such a facility will also allow me to check what time we will arrive for a booked lunch etc. In my job, being able to do this is absolutely essential. As Guzzist says “As a tour guide you need to be a clock watcher.”
To give you some idea of the complexity of the number of rides I plan, take a look at this webpage, where I have simply taken some screenshots from Basecamp to illustrate how many tours I have planned. www.tour1.com/mra-example Trying to do that many without proper time planning would be crazy.
What is worth mentioning is it would be perfectly okay if MRA introduced timed stop point just in the app software so people can be certain their planned ride woks well. That is the essential bit. I can see that then transferring that data into a gpx format to load into a gps unit is way more complicated and I think, somewhat un-necessary. Basecamp does that now – you can check you time planning on your computer, but that time information does not transfer via the gpx file. That is perfectly okay, as for as Nick Carthew says, things happen during the day that slightly change your timing anyway and providing you know how long you planned for (say) a lunch stop or a coffee stop, and you stick to that during the ride, you don’t need to be that accurate.
As a Basecamp user for ten years, I have a lot of time invested in that software and so changing to MRA and transferring my existing routes over would mean a huge amount of work. From my trial of MRA over the past few days, I am very happy with the way it works, how you plan routes, load in a GPS unit and the subsequent use on the road. I have done all of these things easily in the last few days. MRA ticks many of the boxes. But, not being able to add stop time to waypoints is a huge problem for me. I can see why some people (Nick Carthew for example) don’t feel the need for this, but I most certainly do. Trying to ‘wing-it’ on 100 days of riding each year just won’t work.
Basecamp has many drawbacks: it is clunky, has a rubbish search facility and has a terrible user interface. But, but until I know that MRA includes stop times to Waypoints, switching will likely cause as many issues for me than it solves. For me, Basecamp still does everything I need, including timed stop points.
Keep up the good work MRA, you seem to have a winner for most people. I will likely use MRA for simpler rides in order to keep an eye on developments. Hopefully, one day soon MRA will include timed stop point sand that is the day I will switch to using MRA.

@Gary-France & @Drabslab

Hello Gary,

As a planner / guide of journeys, entering times at a planned stop is certainly very useful, I have always used this in my Basecamp time. The advantages that MRA has over basecamp makes working in MRA so much more fun, easier and not unimportant, the routes can be made the same for Garmin & TomTom.
Do I miss entering times? No, I now calculate this myself.
Example: For a coffee stop 30M, and for a "reserved" lunch 1H. You have to play a little with these times, depending on the size of the group and whether everything is reserved in advance.
So I take the time of the route that MRA calculates and add the stops. Simple in an Excel file.
And these times are always fairly accurate. On a ride of 602 KM, with 8 planned stops, arrived 1 minute early at the end point.

[Gary France]

@Hans-van-de-Ven-RouteXpert Hello Hans, I agree the adding of times to planned stops is very useful, indeed for me it is essential. Doing this manually via a spreadsheet would be very time-consuming for 100 days of route planning each year, perhaps as much as 50 hours a year (100 days riding x 15 minutes of calculations, x2 to re-check for later adjustments, final pre-tour checks etc). With a group size of 12-15 bikes, as well as two coffee stops, a lunch stop, photo stops, but I also need to allow for re-filling stops (that take about 20 minutes each) and visits to go see things / places as well. To have to calculate these times on a spreadsheet is of course possible, but too much work. For example, I always check what time we would arrive at an afternoon coffee stop to make sure it is mid-afternoon. If I did that on a spreadsheet and then later added in a fuel stop in the morning, or a petrol stop, or a visit to somewhere, I would need to re-check the afternoon stop time and maybe adjust my route planning accordingly. This happens a lot, so to re-enter the latest information into a spreadsheet would take way too long. Yes, working this out on spreadsheets could be done as a temporary fix, but hey, can it really be that difficult for MRA to add layover times to waypoints, add a user-defined start time to each route and then calculate and show the arrival times at each waypoint? Heck, the system already works out the riding duration at every waypoint, so we know the system works on elapsed time, so it cannot be that difficult to add a planned time to this calculation to provide what you and I consider to be very useful.

For me, it seems there is a good chance this could be added to the MRA system, but my problem is not knowing when this might be added. A week, a month or year or longer makes a huge impact to whether I permanently move away from Basecamp. I am happy to wait until MRA adds this feature, but until then, my work has to continue in Basecamp.

[Hans van de Ven MR.MRA]

@Gary-France
Hi Gary,
thank you for the feedback, I keep the following rule: 1 1/2 hour, maximum 2 hours drive and then a stop for coffee, lunch etc.
For each stop I also add a POI to the route, not as a route point, but as a POI. These are then shown in the Garmin Zumos as "Green Heart". I also use the track as the basis for my routes, I have the Zumo calculate the route based on the track and I then make the track visible in my Zumo as a "white line". For very long journeys, I cut the route in stages, the points where we stop for coffee, lunch are then the end point of one stage and the starting point of the next stage. Then you also have the end time visible in your Zumo when you reach the end point.

But if you make a choice, you should use what works best for you. I made everything in Basecamp and MRA for 1 season, and my choice was quickly made after that year. No more Basecamp for me.