What GPS Can't Do for You

GPS units are getting smaller and smaller and are now light and nimble enough to mount on a bicycle. I've got the Garmin Edge 305 and can now collect data that tells me the route I rode, along with speed, cadence, heart rate, elevation, and grade at any point during the ride. It can also upload the data to motionbased.com and produce a map on Google or Yahoo maps.


But this article is about what the GPS can't do, and why they fall short for the cycling world. Here's my list:

1) You can't record a route and make a bike route map out of it. In other words, the GPS data can't be turned into turn-by-turn directions or cues. When you lay out a GPS track over a map, like Street Atlas USA or Google Maps, it will display the track, but can't figure out what road the track is on. Therefore, you can't record the route and automatically produce cues for your friends.

2) You can't create a really good bicycle map using any software I know of. Maybe you can do some tricks with Photoshop, but you can't give someone a good map straight from the software. The reason: as soon as you zoom out to fit the entire map, those backroads that you ride on disappear. GPS is great for driving directions, and small hikes, but forget bike routes.

3) You can't share the routes easily. At least not the Garmin courses with course points that actually can be useful in cueing you on the ride. It's as if Garmin will make a great piece of hardware, but can't write software to work with it. In the new units, you can transmit information from unit to unit, but can you pull the course off the unit and e-mail it to someone? Sorry.

4) You can't draw a route in any software tool that will download easily to the device with the course points in them. You have to create the map outside of Garmin Training Center, then add the course points in Training Center (since you can't see the roads in TC, this is a futile exercise).

So, they've created a feature-rich device with a lot of features that you can't really use. Oh, well. There are ways to rig this thing to be more robust, but you'll probably spend more time trying to figure it out than you will biking.