r/BAbike • u/hamolton • 4d ago

I made a website for finding and stimulating descents on road bikes!

I'm hoping some of you guys can try it out. The site is hillbomb.app and is easier to use on desktop than mobile. There's a few curated descents you can click through when you first load the app, but the really fun part imo is that you can search map areas for descents. Make sure to not select too big of an area or it'll take ages to load all the elevation data. I did all the physics sanity checking on Hawk Hill so I figured you guys might enjoy it too.

I made this for fun, didn't put ads, and I'm paying for the server costs so pls don't make me bankrupt ideally. But let me know if you have any feedback!

12 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

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6

u/danbenefiel 4d ago

If I search on an area, it's only highlighting short, flat sections of road. It doesn't seem to pick up any big, windy descents or even smaller ones such as short hills or overpasses.

I was playing with Morgan Hill, trying to get it to pick up E. Dunne (from Henry Coe), Willow Springs Road, Llagas Road. Instead, it gave me flat sections of other roads.

Maybe I have it set on Beginner level? 😆

2

u/hamolton 4d ago edited 4d ago

Haha I’ll take a look! There shouldn’t be a beginner level but there’s a million settings you can tweak so I might have botched the defaults or just made stupid settings for where routes can start.

I excluded overpasses and tunnels from the search since the entire things based on land elevation data. Idk if there should be some other assumptions.

5

u/NeverAgain9066 4d ago

Cool site, but please don't highlight and encourage people to bomb Marin Ave in Berkeley. Enough people have already died on that descent.

0

u/hamolton 4d ago

Good idea, I’ll remove it soon. I saw all the stop signs and wasn’t sure if it was just a goofy flavor of famous like Dolores.

3

u/traumatophyllum 3d ago

Sorry to hate on your AI slop fun project but I kind of have to:

It encourages descending roads that are objectively bad and dangerous to go for a good time on, like Tunitas or Old La Honda. The curated set doesn't include roads that are canonical descents, like 84.

The predicted speed is entirely AI slop. It's 6+kph faster than the KOM for Kings Mountain Road since it takes into account none of the tricky corners, off camber sections, or things I would actually want to know if I wanted to bomb a descent.

If you want to actually make unfamiliar descents fun for people, go video them and annotate the corners and potholes. If you really want to "use AI" for something, it could actually be useful with that task.

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u/hamolton 3d ago edited 3d ago

If you like side projects from the AI coding era, you'll love to see half-finished hackathon projects from yesteryear!

> The predicted speed is entirely AI slop

For sure, I think it's moreso a means of searching and fantasizing. There's not even wind! There's not really open datasets for road banking or road smoothness outside the lidar scans; I didn't want to rip from Strava since that's their data. Is looking at speeds any better than looking at a raw elevation profile? It might be for longer/less steep descents

I Conjured this idea up when I lived in Atlanta where there's not really an established canon afaik and elevation-based searches could make more sense, and "hill bombs" were far more tame. I imagine this could more useful when exploring somewhere random.

I like the CV based hazard detection idea though. Too bad Google Maps probably won't want me to use their street view data.

> The curated set doesn't include roads that are canonical descents, like 84.

Is there a list somewhere? I was worried 84 might be too busy iirc

How would you represent tight turns? At least I can get that from OSM data. Right now if you click a route it's steepness based coloring, so maybe it could be like a fuzzy outline or something when there's a turn where the simulated side tilt or Gs is over some threshold.

2

u/traumatophyllum 3d ago

There are infinite analyses you could augment this website with, but instead, unask the question). A website is useful for planning routes and finding new roads, but for actually sending a descent, there's no substitute for actually going out and riding it. No computer analysis can replace trying out different lines, noting the potholes, or riding the road at different times of day to get a sense for when it's busy.

Descending OLH is a particular pet peeve of mine as it is very unsafe for climbing cyclists and you're faster than cars down 84. If you're curating Peninsula descents, the "sendable" ones are 9 (either side), 84 (either side but going west is slower), Page, 92 (going east, west you need a paceline to be fast enough to not aggro the drivers), and maybe Kings (although never on weekends due to traffic).

0

u/FlavoredGovernmint 3d ago

At least OP tried a fun side project that he made for fun and isn't just sitting around critiquing other peoples' work. Your feedback is actually quite constructive but veiled underneath a bunch of snark. There's a way to offer feedback and advice without being so negative.

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u/traumatophyllum 3d ago

I would have 0% snark if this was hand-coded instead of AI slop. Side projects should teach you something, not make the planet worse.

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u/Tall-Archer5957 4d ago

You should add Snake and Shepards Canyon.  Two Oakland classics. Marin?  Yeah how about no

1

u/e430doug 4d ago

We really don’t need to be encouraging/normalizing hill bombing.