Ride Spot by PeopleForBikes 4+

I have been using BikeGPX for years to navigate my way through neighborhoods. It’s not as clean a user interface as Ride Spot, but I get alerts when it’s time to turn or I get off my route. Ride Spot simply traces over your saved route with no feedback, so you need to keep the display on the whole time.

I like how the display in Ride Spot will automatically dim to just your arrow icon and save your battery, but that’s of no use if you are not alerted when it’s time to turn or you stray from your route. BikeGPX is not as sexy as Ride Spot, but you’ll stay on your route easier.

A lot of potential here but more precise searching is needed for someone trying to find an interesting ride or route close to their location or a particular address. You can only search by city which returns so many results in a major metro area that you can’t effectively drill down to a closer location.

Too many of the listings have no title other than Imported via Garmin.... which give you no value regarding where the ride may be or include.

A search with a radius from a point on a map would be very helpful. Also some type of text search within the title or description such as “trail”, “beer”, “food”, etc. would help.

The Filter options don’t seem to save between uses of the app.

Great features are:
Ability to upload photos and add description and details
Ability to save routes you find in searches
Listing the number of likes
I haven’t tried the scan feature or used the routing for an existing route but they seem like excellent options.

People for Bikes is a great organization so I hope to see valuable improvements coming in time for this app. Easily and quickly finding safe routes when you are in a new area is not covered very well in other apps that I have tried and I hope this one can fill that niche. Especially where bike share programs are in place.

I don’t understand this app… not at all intuitive to search (I poked around for an hour before finding the drop down button), you can’t search by looking at a map, you just get lists of trails by name which doesn’t help me figure out if I can get to my dentist by bicycle etc. Google Maps is easier to decipher cycling routes, and that’s sad. The social features aren’t something that other apps don’t have. Other apps have challenges, too. And it seems you can’t automatically sync Ride Spot with Wahoo or Strava? I’m definitely not going to try to track my rides in two places, and I’m not going to manually enter rides. Overall this is a total miss for me.