Arthur is a statistician, data scientist, environmental economist, organic food grower, amateur graphic designer and urbanist. He loves food, bike touring, coding, handcrafts, arts, epistemology, maps and social sciences. He speaks French, English, Danish, basic Spanish, and is learning Italian and German.

He doesn't always talk about himself in the third person.

Germany on track

Yesterday, I discovered , the German national cycling network. Moreover, I discovered that dnetz’s website provides the GPS track of each route in the network. Last but not least, I learned that route is actually the EuroVelo route .

EuroVelo 3, doesn’t it ring a bell? Yes, indeed! It’s The Pilgrims’ Route, the bike route of over 5000 km running from Trondheim (Norway) south to Santiago-de-Compostella (Spain) that I will ride this summer. Maybe you also remember my project to make a journey planning service for this route.

So, why not take advantage of dnetz’s GPS tracks for mapping EuroVelo 3? We can even compare them with the data from OpenStreetMap!

Quickly built…

The track of route is available here in format GPX and, applying what we learned the other day, it is now just a question of minutes between when we download the file and when we display it on a map.

Even and uneven lines. When the data is imported as only one track – as here with the GPS track from dnetz, the display is even, with one plain, smooth line. This is in contrast with imports from OpenStreetMap, which are made of several hundreds of smaller tracks, hence the unhomogeneous rendering.

… and quickly analysed

The first and happy result is that data from dnetz (in blue) are complete, with one consistent and continuous line from Flensburg to Aachen. This is to oppose to the track from OpenStreetMap, which is completely irregular, with many line breaks causing an ugly rendering on the mapI use the JavaScript library for the construction of the map. I will explain how it works an other day but you can already have a look at this intoductive exemple on Leaflet’s website..

The second (and less happy) result is that the two tracks surprisingly disagree on non-negligeable parts of the itinerary, for instance at the arrival to Hambburg.

Maybe there are good reasons for these differences – such as agricultural roads that ceased to be correctly maintained – but I do not have yet any information for favoring one track over the other. In the meanwhile, I will favor route , for the only and wrong reason that the rendering on the map is smoother.