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.