Group Tours

[Paul Johnson 5]

Hi Everyone.

Does anyone have some top tips to offer on sharing routes, which have been carefully constructed by me on MRA, and then distributed to the rest of the tour group who will no doubt be using all manner of different devices to navigate by, so that we ride the same route even if we get split up?

[richtea999]

@Paul-Johnson-5

This could be pointing out the bleeding obvious, but here we go...

First step: get Gold membership (hey ho, but the devs need to make a living) to gain access to vital features below.

Second step (others will come up with better ones I'm sure):

• use the Toolkit -> 'Compare route with' option

You can see how each of the main routing engines think your waypoints sit on each map. It can be surprising!

You need to go to the maximum zoom to check, especially in urban areas, where one engine might route a different way to the other. Which is right? Who knows, but make a sensible guess and force the others to follow that route with some extra waypoints.

Also don't forget that having the 'Traffic' option enabled on HERE maps may give you 'odd' results if you're planning for a trip in x months time (it may route you around a closed road which will be open next week), so consider turning that off during long-term planning.

Adjust the waypoints accordingly so that all routing methods show the same route.

Then distribute, and not before!

Last rule:

• The leader is the boss - so follow him. Yup, even up that dead end that he misunderstood. It doesn't matter if the follower's satnavs say otherwise.

[EDIT: just re-reading your post: if you mean the route is perfect in all possible routing engines, but the riders/drivers aren't perfect, then you need to add fixed meeting points on the route, i.e. 'via' points that must be passed through every 15-30 mins. At worst you'll only lose them for 30 mins. It that fails it's back to texting and finding out what went wrong, and agreeing a waypoint number to meet up again.]

[Guzt]

Hi Paul, the art of optimizing routes so that everyone TT or Garmin drive the same route:
https://forum.myrouteapp.com/post/42699

[Con Hennekens]

@Paul-Johnson-5, The easiest way to share a route is... to share a route

Make sure to set your route to public (or friends) before you share it.

[Paul Johnson 5]

@Con-Hennekens
Hi.
I know how to share the route and how to compare Garmin and Tom Tom and put in extra shaping points etc, but wanted to hear of any tips about how it all works best in practice.

One thought I had was to persuade everyone to get a trial copy of MRA-navigation for the tour, which I assume will follow my route better than others?

[richtea999]

@Paul-Johnson-5 We've successfully shared the GPX files across Garmin, TomTom and MRA, so I don't think you need to do that.
Just make absolutely sure the two variants (HERE, TomTom) exactly match (zoom in along the whole route!). To do that matching you'll need a Gold membership - just you though.

If you do discover differences whilst riding the route, then it's quite possibly down to traffic algorithms /closed roads, as mentioned earlier. That's the one thing that's caught us out.

More waypoints can overcome the different traffic algorithms, but not closed roads.

[Con Hennekens]

@Paul-Johnson-5, If you plan carefully and use the compare function, I don't think you wil run into much problems. But getting them a trial is always a good idea. Maybe they wil stick with it

[Guzt]

@Paul-Johnson-5 said in Group Tours:

One thought I had was to persuade everyone to get a trial copy of MRA-navigation for the tour, which I assume will follow my route better than others?

Keep on dreaming lol