Made me a hero in the rain! – Bikemap: Bike Trails & Tracker Review

This app for cycling fills a unique space in the world of cycling apps, where many seem more about 'the quantified self' or are for crowing about one's latest ride on social media. In contrast, this is a valuable tool. Imagine visiting a city and having a local or at least a prior rider share a visible and viable route for you to follow. And you can store such advance intel right in the app: multiple routes, even. Just returned from Belgium, where I led 3 other riders around on juants between medieval cities, as a first-time visitor myself. As an experienced cyclist and hiker, I'm used to good maps and am usually able to 'suss' out a route in unknown territory. I nevertheless found the ability to save other riders' routes in the "Route Collection" part of this app to be invaluable. Did not need active internet, but used the internal GPS in my phone. Though you won't be guaranteed that someone has already laid a track to exactly where you want to go, for us it worked out beautifully. (often we followed just the portion of track that pertained to our desired destination.) Even in bicycle-friendly Belgium, I saw that just studying the terrain on a map could be fraught with many go-arounds and false starts for someone not familiar with the country. I learned through trial and error on my own in the beginning that there are key places where one will do better to leave one canal and join another, and sections where industrial activity forced go-arounds, etc. With this app, I was able to pick out previous riders' blue-lined routes and carefully preview them on my iPhone 5s. This seems to cache the map on the device in the app. (I did have ability to turn on Data if needed, which I believe is wise in general--sometimes users accidentally fail to scroll around enough to cache desired map tiles beforehand.) We set out, and I simply noted our location arrow as we followed along. There were places along the Gent-Brugge canal where our invisible friend who'd tracked this route had taken detours. To us it seemed he'd probably just gone off the canal to get something to eat; my friends who couldn't read the Flemish sign thought we should just continue on the canal. Yet the miles of truly helpful route we'd already covered gave me the instinct to suggest we follow his detour. And my very sparse Dutch seemed to indicate that the very passable section of canal we could see beyond a simple pipe gate in front of us had some kind of prohibition against bikes (fietsen) in what might be a "fishing/wildlife/locals only" area. (that turned out to be so, and we encountered one more section like this.) We were riding in heavy rain, and it was so nice to avoid stopping often to route-find; just looking for street signs and studying intersections takes time; stopping to discuss route problems makes it hard get a good workout. We didn't even need to puzzle out the many 'fietsknoppen' numbered route signs, that are so numerous they actually add confusion: to follow those signs one feels like you're on a coded treasure hunt, noting numbers and junctions and transfers to other sections... Though their existence is proof of the wonderful surplus of bike networks in this part of the world. But we were able to just keep riding following the saved route! I had my phone in a waterproof case on my stem. I only wish we'd had more time to explore the many other riders' recorded tracks. As you can see, I got great use out of this app. I intend to do my bit back home now to save some favorite routes around me. Even though you can't build a route in advance by plotting on a map, it's probably for the best that you instead track yourself on an actual ride.
Review by Ollyappleseed on Bikemap: Bike Trails & Tracker.