Time management: Corridor Aerobique

The spring 2014 issue of Bicycle Quarterly features an article on creating schedules for long, timed rides. I must admit, this is not something I have done much—my approach to riding brevets has been to just do it, and if it takes me more than the time limit: whatevs. Schedules and goals sound too much like work and not fun. Yesterday, however, I found a new trail that I'd like to add to my collection and that because of its location will require me to do some more careful scheduling ahead of the ride.

Via someone's Twitter update I discovered the Corridor Aerobique, a new-to-me bike trail in the Lower Laurentians. It is 57 kilometers, connecting Morin Heights to Amherst mostly on a gravel surface away from car traffic, and soon the Corridor will be connected to the P'tit Train du Nord. Since I loved all of my previous rides through the Laurentians I really want to try this one, too. But Amherst's location at the end of the trail could be aptly described as "in the middle of nowhere," so how would I get back home?

To get a sense of the distances, I used GPSies to map a route starting at the de la Concorde metro  in Laval, then taking the P'tit train du Nord to Saint-Sauveur, the Corridor to Amhert, and then heading south towards the Ottawa River and following the Route Verte through Oka back to the Deux-Montagnes commuter rail station.



 Unfortunately, that is be a total distance of 285 kilometers—doable on my road bike, but probably not so much on my Cross-Check, which is all I have access to at the moment. My average speed on the CC tends to be about three kilometers per hour less than on the Gunnar, meaning that I'd have to spend about two additional hours in the saddle. In addition, I would have to time the start of the ride in a way that would get me back to Deux-Montagnes at a time when the trains are actually running and accept bikes on board.

Some 35 kilometers at the beginning of the ride could be shaved off by taking the train to Saint-Jérôme. But that further exacerbates the timing problems. The first weekday train to Saint-Jérôme would get me there at 8:20, leaving me with 14 hours and 40 minutes until the last Deux-Montagnes departure at 23:00, or an overall average of close to 18 km/h. With time off the bike limited to 3 hours I'd need a moving average of about 22.3 km/h; or 20.5 km/h with two hours off the bike. To assess how realistic those speeds are one would have to compare to data from other rides of similar distance, something which is mostly missing in this case, as usually I ride Gunnar on longer rides. From the data I have I would conclude that the plan is ambitious but probably doable.

So let's make a schedule roughly following the BQ method. Since this is not a brevet I had to come up with my own intermediate points, basing them on the elevation profile, the location of villages and towns, or major changes in direction. When entering the data into the spreadsheet it became clear the that plan with 3 hours off the bike probably was not going to work out, as it required moving averages too high on several sections. With the two-hour plan, however, things look more promising:



Unless I encounter major problems like detours, mechanical issues, or adverse weather, I think I can do this. Assuming the weather forecast doesn't change and I get through enough work over the weekend I might try it on Monday. To be continued.

Plan your bike rides with aggregated Strava data

Edit 2013-08-17: Please read the update at the end of the post.
Edit 2014-05-31: As this post appears to be getting a lot of search engine traffic, I'd like to point out that the functionality I'm describing here is now available much more comfortably as part of Strava itself. I guess I was not to only person intrigued by the concept.

Most people would not think of Strava as a planning tool. Sure, it's a great performance and training tracker and provides lots of opportunities to compete with fellow cyclists and yourself, but its use for route planning is less obvious.

The basic problem is this: You want to plan a ride in area that you don't know well. There are many roads, but how can you tell apart the heavily trafficked, narrow highway from the lovely scenic back road? There already are a number of tool that can help, but they all have some shortcomings. For the amount of traffic on a given road, one can look up traffic count data from state or local departments of transportation (e.g. New York State). Depending on your location, this works reasonably well for major roads, but the small back roads that are often the nicest to ride on often lack count data. Google Street View can give you a good general impression of a road -- how wide is it, does it have a shoulder, are there big potholes? -- but it can be tedious to check longer stretches of a road. OpenStreetMap allows everyone to add useful information to their geographic database, like the existence of shoulders, the smoothness of the road, or its speed limit; but so far a lot of those features are not displayed on the map and the data especially in North America is very incomplete.

Probably a nice road for cycling -- unless the road is only this empty on early Sunday mornings ... (Screenshot from Google Street View)

So wouldn't it be great if you could just ask a fellow cyclist what she thinks of the road in question? Or, as different cyclists have different preferences, if you could ask a hundred cyclists? Or a thousand? Well, why not just do that: Hundreds of thousands of athletes log their bike rides on the Strava website, and fortunately Strava provides an API that allows other applications to access that data. The folks at raceshape.com offer a number of different analysis tools, but for our purposes the "global heatmap" is the one that's most useful.

What the heatmap does is to basically accumulate all the GPS data from Strava and overlay it on a map, with the color of the tracks representing the number of times a road has been ridden on. If you look at Montreal, for example, you can very clearly see some of the most popular cycling routes: the Estacade across the St. Lawrence, the Lachine Canal bike path, or the various ways to climb and descend Mont Royal.

Screenshot from raceshape.com

 Just like the approaches described above, there are limitations to the global heatmap for ride planning as well: Less populated areas often don't have sufficient data to be displayed on the map. In addition, it's important to keep in mind that Strava is mostly used by road cyclists, evidenced by the fact that for example the very popular bike path along the Chambly Canal doesn't even appear on the map -- presumably because it has a gravel surface.

Some traces of activity on the two highways along the Richelieu River, but nothing on the bike path (Screenshot from raceshape.com)

That being said, my own experience with using the map for route planning has been very positive. It has allowed me to discover some great cycling roads -- and avoid some of the not-so-awesome ones.

Update: As Andy and Brian have pointed out in the comments, the data used for the global heatmap is more limited than I thought: Instead of representing all or even a large portion of Strava ride data, it is only a small subset of those Strava users who explicitly have allowed the raceshape website to access their data. And at the moment there isn't even a link on the raceshape homepage to do that. If you would like to have your data included and get your own personal heatmap, use this link.