Green Routing Improvements
Over the last few weeks we’ve been working hard on our Green Routes which is now officially 1 year old! Your feedback over the past 12 months has been incredible and where things needed improvement we’ve made some exciting changes.
User Ratings
When we launched our dynamic green routes last year we also started asking the community to rate the paths and greenspaces they walked through. Since then you have rated over 2000 unique greenspaces across the UK and Ireland, and many more paths. As of today we’re now applying all of these ratings into our route suggestions, helping to make better routes for all of our users.
Please keep your ratings coming in, each one helps make a better route for yourself and others in the future.
Busy Roads
Most people who have used any navigation app outside of cities will have noticed sometimes you may be directed down an undesirable road - the kind with lots of traffic, a high speed limit and no designated pavement. With our latest update we’re helping to take some of the guesswork out of these routes.
Through our different data sources we have a very detailed idea of the walkable path network across the British Isles but sometimes the data may be lacking. Where this is the case, we will now highlight on the map that we can’t be confident that a certain section of road is desirable to walk down. Feel free to let us know how you find this feature and any suggestions that would make you feel more confident getting out and exploring new places.
In the New Year we will be looking to extend this, letting you feedback directly in the app about how safe a road is. Where possible we will feed this data back into open source datasets like OpenStreetMaps to improve everyone’s walking experience beyond our app.
Circular Walks
Since launching last year we have suggested over 200,000 round trips in the app. Your feedback keeps helping to make these even better. Our latest update has a few more tweaks to make these even more enjoyable. Now alongside our automatic suggestions you can tap and hold on the map to let us know where you would like to create your own circular walk. This will work the same way as our own suggestions, helping to avoid backtracking on yourself and keeping your walk full of new paths you may not have known about.
As a small team with big ambitions, the help of our brilliant community has been invaluable. We are so grateful! Please keep getting out walking, exploring your own area and beyond, and letting us know through the app, on Twitter, Instagram or email how you found any of our walks or even what you would like to see next in the app.
Take care and hope your Christmas and New Year is full of joyful micro-adventures on foot.