Garmin Edge Touring Plus mapping abilities

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hercule
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Garmin Edge Touring Plus mapping abilities

Post by hercule »

Apologies if this has been asked before...

I'm looking at getting a Garmin Edge Touring Plus... I'd quite have liked the 800 but it seems to be no longer available anywhere. Mostly it will be used for fitness/leisure riding (HR belt but no power hubs or other such stuff... pity it can't run a cadence sensor) but I'd also like the mapping option. I already have the Garmin City Navigator maps on SD card, so this looks like a simple matter of dropping it in. According to Garmin the OS 1:50k maps will also work.

I've read various comments on how poor the Touring is at route finding but I wonder if this is map dependent. Open Streetmap is next to useless around here, there are many small roads ideal for cycling that just don't appear. As this seems to be the standard basemap on the Touring, will things be better with the City Navigator, even better with OS? Or is it a fundamental issue with the algorithm that they use and routing deficiencies are independent of mapping?
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robgul
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Re: Garmin Edge Touring Plus mapping abilities

Post by robgul »

I have an Edge Touring - excellent with mapping (both Ordnance Survey and OSM, less so with the native Garmin maps) BUT complete rubbish if you ask it to plot/create a route for you. I ONLY use it with pre-plotted routes from Memory Map or gpx files extracted from other online mapping.

The Garmin routing seems to take obscure and circuitous routes, often on either very main roads - or even "roads" that don't exist!

Rob
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Samuel D
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Re: Garmin Edge Touring Plus mapping abilities

Post by Samuel D »

I have an Edge 800 that I use with Garmin’s City Navigator maps. I have also experimented with an eTrex 20 and OpenStreetMap (OSM) maps.

Although I much prefer to plan (at least roughly) a route at home with paper maps and Google Street View, the Edge and City Navigator combo does produce generally quite reasonable routes if I let it. They won’t be the most scenic or traffic-free, but they’ll get you there quite directly.

OSM maps on a Garmin is another matter. At least where I live (Paris), the routes produced can’t be trusted to be reasonably direct. It sometimes make routes twice as long as City Navigator. For me that is usually unacceptable.

I understand this is because the OSM maps, though visually very detailed, do not have all the roads linked up for the routing algorithm to see them as joined. They look linked up on the display, but they have invisible logical gaps.

Since the OSM maps have many useful details that City Navigator maps don’t (e.g. public water fountains for filling your bottles), I like to keep them both and switch between them as needed. But City Navigator just works much better for auto-routing.

By the way, the Edge 800 and eTrex 20 produce identical routes with the same maps and routing settings. It would surprise me if the Touring and Touring Plus are any different. The routing seems to depend only on the maps.

Another thing: I am not sure Ordnance Survey maps are routable (if they are raster-based rather than vector-based they are not). However, they may have an invisible routable map ‘behind’ the displayed map for the purpose of auto-routing. If this is OSM-derived it will likely suffer from the same shortcomings as OSM maps themselves.

In other words, if you care about auto-routing for getting places as opposed to taking pleasant but circuitous routes, nothing I’ve tried can touch City Navigator. Since you have a City Navigator card, just plug it in and you should be set – assuming the card was bought preloaded with the maps (if it’s your own card with a downloaded version of City Navigator it may be locked to the device you downloaded it for).
thidwick
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Re: Garmin Edge Touring Plus mapping abilities

Post by thidwick »

I have an Edge Touring Plus, but I haven't any experience of other Garmins or of other cycle GPS systems. I find the maps on the Garmin pretty good, and I have learned to use Bikeroutetoaster to create and save routes to put onto the Garmin. That works well, and the Garmin seems faultless on helping navigate on a saved route like that. Even detouring off the route can be recovered. If setting off to ride and then meandering, the Garmin will tell me how to get back to home or start point.
On the other hand, I once asked the Garmin to navigate me to an address in a city (Carlisle). I ended up going all manner of extra roads and extra distance whilst the b*****y Garmin prevaricated. And yet the TomTom in the car is brilliant at that sort of navigating.
I like looking at the maps and road names when I am cycling. The Garmin is good for that. On the whole I really like it.
Richard Fairhurst
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Re: Garmin Edge Touring Plus mapping abilities

Post by Richard Fairhurst »

Samuel D wrote:I understand this is because the OSM maps, though visually very detailed, do not have all the roads linked up for the routing algorithm to see them as joined. They look linked up on the display, but they have invisible logical gaps.


I don't think that's the case. The vast majority of OSM ways are joined as they should be - otherwise cycle.travel, CycleStreets and other routing sites couldn't work. I think it's simply that getting a Garmin to route properly is hard, particularly because OSM volunteers have entirely reverse-engineered the Garmin file format with no assistance from Garmin themselves, and therefore don't have all the knowledge available to the producers of the City Navigator maps.
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Samuel D
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Re: Garmin Edge Touring Plus mapping abilities

Post by Samuel D »

Richard Fairhurst wrote:
Samuel D wrote:I understand this is because the OSM maps, though visually very detailed, do not have all the roads linked up for the routing algorithm to see them as joined. They look linked up on the display, but they have invisible logical gaps.


I don't think that's the case. The vast majority of OSM ways are joined as they should be - otherwise cycle.travel, CycleStreets and other routing sites couldn't work.

I agree the “vast majority” are joined as they should be, but it only takes a couple of unconnected ways to seriously mess up a route. This user of OSM maps lists “non connected streets in OSM” as the number one reason for bad auto-routing.

In my experience the routing sites often don’t work perfectly either, but it’s true they usually work better than auto-routing with OSM maps in a Garmin. I imagine that is partly because they have far more computer power available and therefore smarter routing algorithms. Garmin users also have the additional problem of sometimes using incorrect route-avoidance settings, since the Garmin labels (e.g. highways, tolls, etc.) have been re-purposed by some OSM users to create routable maps for niche uses like hiking or cycling but the users often don’t know this or misunderstand what the labels really mean. This hack is a flatly terrible idea, but it’s the sort of thing you often see in open-source software.
hercule
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Re: Garmin Edge Touring Plus mapping abilities

Post by hercule »

That's very helpful to know, thanks. The City Navigator map set is on SD so there's no reason it shouldn't work on any Garmin. I was prevaricating as to whether I should shell out the extra for the Edge 810 but it comes with a stack of stuff I don't and won't need, and when it sounds like the mapping is likely to be the same between units that makes a convincing case for the Touring Plus. I will probably plan routes on the computer first but on my previous non-bike GPS it was handy sometimes to plan routes on the go.
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