Download This App and Reboot Your Commute
Strictly for fans of the twisty bits.
Best Biking Roads was created for motorcycle riders, but if you drive, and care about driving, it’s a must-have, too.
With 2,713 rides in the United States and thousands more around the globe, Best Biking Roads is a website that went viral in the moto world. The rides are crowdsourced, updated, posted about and all the tracks are archived, which in the past meant downloading tracks to a GPS device to get them to be mobile. Or, egad, printing them!
The app yields pretty much the same info as the website, with rides listed by location and cross-referenced by road quality and hazards. Useful updates by users—for instance, noting where to stop for food or where the local constabulary likes to hide—are also bundled. The ride descriptions vary from lengthy to terse, but use your eyes to look at contour lines and squiggles, and you’ll surely intuit if a road will be fun or not.
The app live-maps your present location, so if you vary the course but want to pick up that key snaking section of pavement, it’s easy to just pick off the part of the route you care about.
And just like the website, you can download the GPX track of your route and either bounce that to a unit like a Garmin, or to a more robust navigation app such as GPS Kit, which tracks your position even without cell service. And you probably want to do the latter. Because while this is one exceptional ride/drive route database, it’s not Google Maps, so for granularity you’ll want a backup app or two.
