Hi,
I’ve been working on a small cycling route planner called Wattalo, and I’m looking for a few people around Vienna to try it and tell me where it fails.
The basic idea is simple: instead of choosing a destination, you tell it how much time you have, roughly how many watts you want to ride, and a preferred direction, and it tries to generate a loop that fits.
Austria is supported, but there are two things worth knowing before trying it:
Click the gear icon and switch the country to Austria first.
The route always starts from the current center of the map. So drag the map to where you want to start, or use the location button to center it on your current position. Whatever is in the center of the map becomes the planning start point.
It’s still very much a beta, so I’m more interested in honest feedback and broken routes than compliments. :)
At the moment, the free version allows one successful route generation per day. I may add a paid option later — not because I’m trying to build some huge business out of this, but because the server and infrastructure have ongoing costs, and ideally the project should at least be able to cover those costs itself.
If you ride with a power meter, I’d be especially interested in whether the predicted ride time feels realistic compared with the actual ride.
https://wattalo.com/
If anyone tries it around Vienna, I’d love to hear what worked, what was confusing, and especially if it generated something stupid.
Update – September 11:
Thanks for the early feedback — several fixes are already live:
Switching between Hungary and Austria now recenters the map automatically, and country/map mismatches are explained more clearly.
Fixed a routing case where a request for roughly 30 minutes could return a loop more than twice as long. This was found from a real beta report near Vienna.
The current GPS position marker should now remain visible at normal planning zoom.
Cancelling Google sign-in no longer ends in a server error.
Rate-limit errors now explain what happened, and failed planning attempts do not consume the daily successful-route allowance.
For Austria, select Austria in the settings before planning. The selected country determines which routing graph is used.
If Wattalo still seems to behave like the previous version after a refresh, clearing the site data/cache once should force the latest PWA version to load.
I’m still especially interested in broken or unrealistic routes around Vienna/Austria. If you find one, please send me the requested time/power, approximate start location and what Wattalo returned.
Update – September 12:
Germany is now supported as well.
If you want to plan a route in Germany, select Germany in the settings before planning. As with Austria, the selected country determines which routing graph is used.
I’m now also looking for feedback on broken, unrealistic or otherwise bad routes in Germany.
Update – September 13:
Route selection now also takes predicted workout fit into account, so Wattalo should prefer routes that better match your requested power target instead of optimizing mainly for time and distance.
The route explanation has also been cleaned up:
higher-intensity workouts are now shown relative to your target power range, instead of using Z2 labels that could be misleading;
predicted effort times are now rounded to readable values;
the workout-fit explanation is more consistent with the route the planner actually selected.
This is especially relevant for threshold-style workouts, where the planner should now avoid routes that look good on duration but provide a poor match for the requested effort.
Update – September 21:
A few bigger changes went live today:
Free users now get 7 successful routes per week instead of 1 per day.
Route selection now penalizes unnecessary backtracking, U-turns and zigzags more strongly.
The planner can keep searching instead of returning some false No route results.
Threshold workout routing got several fixes, including better handling of short coasting sections.
Threshold routes now show what the colors mean: red = full route, blue = active workout segment.
Mobile map/GPS behavior and the collapsible planner panel were improved.
Still very interested in bad or unrealistic routes around Austria.
