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We're planning to try two variants of a bike¹ for prolonged test rides, and would like to seek out some climbs to determine which variant we will buy. The questions we want to answer in those test rides:

  • Can we make it up a slope that is 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%?
  • How much effort does this take / how long can we sustain this?

I can study a topographic map to search for hilly areas, but telling the difference between a 10% or a 15% slope is difficult. I can put different routes into komoot and it will tell me (with more or less accuracy) how steep it is, but that doesn't let me search specifically for slopes in a 10%-15% range in the area where we rent the bike (and komoot also has a habit of sending cyclists onto 22% steep hiking trails where even pushing the bike would be an exhausting challenge).

Is there a resource where we can search specifically for streets/roads based on gradient? We don't care if the road leads anywhere interesting (but it should be low on car traffic), we just want to try what gradient we can manage and where the limit is for the two different variants.

¹Hase Pino Tour with Rohloff with muscle power, or Hase Pino Steps with a 250 W electric assist. For slopes in the range of 10–15%, the 250 W assist might make the difference between cycling or pushing.

gerrit
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  • A tip for Komoot, which I use regularly: even if touring, use Road Cycling mode, or flip between Road and Touring modes to see the difference. Drag manual waypoints to customise the route if you want to go off-road. Road Cycling mode will warn you if it knows about unpaved surfaces, Touring mode won't. Road mode still uses paved cycleways where they exist. – Chris H Jun 29 '23 at 12:20
  • 15 % is quite limiting, even popular roads with cycling routes marked along them exceed this slope on shorter stretches. – Vladimir F Героям слава Jun 29 '23 at 12:20
  • @VladimirFГероямслава all the more reason to plan based on mapping data rather than popularity, and to test ride. – Chris H Jun 29 '23 at 12:22
  • @VladimirFГероямслава The Hase Pino in on of its modes is a cargo bike, it's expected to reach the limit earlier than on road bikes. – gerrit Jun 29 '23 at 12:51

1 Answers1

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What about https://climbfinder.com?

Seems to have a search based on gradient but data quality may indeed depend on the region. Only works in Europe but based on your 22% climb, you're coming from Germany, so that would be a match.

DoNuT
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    Interesting, but seems to be very limited in Germany. For example, around Würzburg there is nothing, but from personal experience I can say that many streets in Würzburg are really steep. – gerrit Jun 29 '23 at 12:49
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    Yeah, I checked my area and it is really just "big" climbs, while there are tons of hard mini-climbs all around (several 100 meters up to 10km up to 10%). I would recommend Strava (routes) but I'm afraid that's only limited to paid subscriptions. – DoNuT Jun 29 '23 at 12:59
  • It should be possible with at most moderate GIS programming skills to combine Openstreetmap with a high-resolution DEM to mark roads by gradient. But probably not many publicly available DEMs have a high enough resolution for the short very steep sections. – gerrit Jun 29 '23 at 13:02
  • @gerrit At least SRTM or ASTER are not really detailed enough for short steep climbs. Some national geographical or cartographical bodies may release some of their data to public under some license. For example, a lot of data of the Czech office will be released to public the day after tomorrow (1. 7. 2023). – Vladimir F Героям слава Jun 29 '23 at 13:40