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I'm planning to do a bike trip, and it would be useful for me to know how much of actual climbing I would have to do. I wasn't quite sure to post it on travel.se or bicycles.SE, as it's also partly about trip planning.

I was wondering if it is possible to find the coordinates of roads, rather than the surface they're on. I thought Google maps and or Earth might be able to do this, as they collect streetview data by car. But they seem to only use satellite data. The difference is nicely illustrated at the bridge of Millau. Here you can clearly see that the route calculations uses the bridge, yet maps this on the ground surface.

Does anybody know any way to get the actual GPS coordinates of planned routes over roads?

enter image description here Source: Google Earth

andy256
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ROIMaison
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  • How is it travel related? –  Jul 16 '15 at 14:26
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    @JonathanReez one travels on roads. – phoog Jul 16 '15 at 14:27
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    I'm planning to do a bike trip, and it would be useful for me to know how much of actual climbing I would have te do. I wasn't quite sure to post it here or in the biking.SE or here, as it's also partly about trip planning. –  Jul 16 '15 at 14:29
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    What you want are the vertical coordinates: elevations aka 3D GIS data. –  Jul 16 '15 at 17:26
  • @phoog but not all movement on roads are [travel.se] worthy questions. Perhaps read this meta question and maybe submit an answer in addition to my own. Then relate to the fact that this question was not explicitly about a bike-trip until someone other than the OP edited it in. –  Jul 16 '15 at 17:29
  • I would say this is a question for http://gis.stackexchange.com/ –  Jul 16 '15 at 19:03
  • I think the exchange site for bicycle users is a better fit for this question. – Nzall Jul 17 '15 at 12:40
  • I agree, but I guess people who like hiking might also benefit from this information. –  Jul 17 '15 at 12:42
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    I'm confused. How would actual GPS coordinates help one plan a trip? Surely road elevations, gradients, directions and distances would be more useful. – andy256 Jul 19 '15 at 22:53
  • Just checked Strava, and it looks like they use ground heights for the bridges as well, which is kind of surprising since they should have the road elevation data for roads ridden by cyclists. Also worth noting that I'm not so sure how good the bridge of Millau is for riding. I couldn't get Strata to let me use that road for a route, and from the aerial view it looks like a pretty major road which is probably high speed with lots of traffic. – Kibbee Jul 19 '15 at 23:10
  • @Kibbee Thanks for you comment, I know the bridge of Millau is not meant for riding, I just used it as an example as I know there is a large difference between ground height and road height. – ROIMaison Jul 20 '15 at 07:05
  • @ROIMaison I was just wondering if you had some ideas about riding across it as the riders in the Tour de France rode by there, although not on it, and the TV commentators were stating that they should have used the bridge, as it would have made for great television. – Kibbee Jul 21 '15 at 13:40

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In the UK, Cyclestreet does this. I just tried a route over the Forth Road Bridge, starting and ending on the shore. On the elevation profile you can clearly see that it goes up to 40m (the height of the bridge) and is not projected onto the surface, which would be sea level:

Elevation profile

Cyclestreet is based in map data from OpenStreetMap, but it is not clear if they use also data from other sources. Presumably OSM has elevation data, but I could not find a way to see this in OSM directly.

Stephan Matthiesen
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