Navigation Nightmare

With the arrival of navigation software for smartphones I decided to have another go, enthused by the smaller size of Smartphones and their generally good battery life. I’ve tried three different solutions: Route66 for Series 60, TomTom Mobile for Series 60 and ALK’s CoPilot on an Orange SPV C500.



I tend to use the last of these most often, because I prefer the software and because of the handlebar mount I use for my SPV C500 – a rather good system from Krusell that’s sturdy, small and incorporates a phone case that’s usable away from the handlebars.

The SPV C500 case has a protruding section on the back which hooks into the holder that’s left permanently on the cycle. When you lock the bike up, you can unclip the phone. That protruding section can be removed, though it’s fiddly as there’s a small clip that’s not accessible with fingers, which needs to be released. I use a pen for this purpose. The fiddle aside, the system works well for me.

I’m sure there are plenty of UK retailers of this system. I got mine from a store called www.inkino.co.ukINKINO (the store name is an acronym for I Never Knew I Needed One, which is rather amusing).

Anyway, back to the point in hand. With a cycle mounted Smartphone, Bluetooth GPS antenna, and wired headset (fed through clothing with some slack to allow for general movement), I have found what I consider to be a reasonably good solution, and one which should allow me to cycle pretty well without having to stop to refer to a paper map at regular intervals.

Well, that’s the theory. But now we come to the crunch. And it’s a humdinger which no amount of trying alternative combinations of kit will deal with.

In a nutshell, navigation software is designed with car users in mind.

The producers of software for mobile devices, laptops and desktop computers use independent sources for their data, companies that spend their money and time gathering data and digitising this. For those companies the big market is in driving solutions, for individual consumers, for companies, for fleet management. Cyclists, I think, aren’t even close to getting on the pecking order.

This means that route planning software can know about things like one way roads and roads where no car access is permitted. Though actually, there’s an access road very near my home which software usually insists I use even though it is not suitable for cars, but data integrity is another story entirely. But it also means the software can’t know about roads which are one way for cars but two way for cycles, or shared pedestrian and cycle tracks, or those useful little tracks across parks which are designated as cycle-ways and can often avoid a nasty junction or two or cut the corner off a tarmac-based section of a trip.

A cyclist being guided by navigation software who sees what they think is a better route than the software is suggesting has three choices: go off route and assume that the software will pull them back on, do as they are told, or get the paper map out and see if the nice looking alternative to the suggested route will work or not.

This puts the cyclist firmly between a rock and a hard place. Resorting to a paper map feels like giving in, though almost always it’s Hobson’s choice.

Will the situation ever change? I certainly hope so. But the data mapping companies have to start seeing cyclists as a market first, and at the moment I firmly believe that this is a long way off. Sales for motor vehicle based portable navigation systems of all types are still very much in their infancy and I rather suspect all eyes are on growing those markets.

Which leaves me in the rather annoying situation of having found a combination of various types of hardware which works to an acceptable level, but waiting for the software to catch up.

While I wait, it’s time to order another set of London Cycle Guides, as my current ones are getting rather tatty.