Online Route Planners: Test 1

This week I have been testing the route planner on Fetch Everyone, an online resource and community for runners (www.fetcheveryone.com).
When I first started looking at Fetch Everyone (from now on I’ll shorten to FE), I experienced a slight sinking feeling. It just looked too damn good, and so I began to regret choosing it as the very first route-planning tool to review.

Fortunately for my blog, but unfortunately for the FE folks, I did eventually find a few niggles which prevent it from quite becoming the perfect route planning tool, and therefore allow my quest to continue.

FE is a huge site, with over 17000 members and a wealth of services from forums, photo galleries and blogs to training plans and logs. Everything on the site is free, although you can do very little without registering, which means you also need to log in to use the route planner. However, once you are logged in the ‘measure route’ tool is conveniently sited at the top of a drop down menu of tasks, showing they know what runners are likely to want to do when visiting the site quickly.

The tool itself uses googlemaps and offers the same map/satellite/hybrid views that I’ve seen on other google-powered sites. My personal bugbear with googlemaps is that they do not show places of interest or useful amenities that you would find on your average paper map or A-Z. As well as meaning you can’t choose routes which may run right past historical or interesting sights, you cannot plan your route based on nearby petrol stations or public toilets (a problem long-distance runners will understand). Another major drawback to using only googlemaps to plan your run is that you cannot see altitude or elevation.

But if you are not bothered by unexpected hills or points of interest and just want to know distance this is a neat way to do it, and there are a few things which make FE an improvement on other tools that also use google. Number 1 there are clear instructions at the top of the page telling you how to use the tool. This sounds obvious but there are other sites (Sanoodi for one- see my previous rant) that leave you in the dark meaning wasted time faffing around when you coud be out running. There is also a clever button to press to quickly create a ‘there and back’ course without retracing your steps.

To plot your route you simply type in the postcode of your starting place and then double click to draw a marker at points along your route. Again, it is such a simple thing but the double click mechanism means you don’t accidentally plot a marker way off course when trying to move the screen up or down.

FE allows you to save your past routes and annotate them with descriptions (thanks to the lack of elevation guidance my description of my latest route now reads “VERY LONG HILL. ONLY DO IF FEELING MENTAL!!”). The tool also remembers your original location so the map is zoomed in to your start place whenever you subsequently visit the site. However this means it is not very easy to plan routes for other areas you might visit and I could only test routes in other towns or countries by zooming way out and zooming in a bit at a time to find the right place, which is rather awkward.

One of the best features of Sanoodi was being able to look at other peoples runs for ideas. FE also has this feature, but there were not nearly so many routes in my area as there were on Sanoodi and it is not possible to compare them by distance so FE rates slightly lower on this facility.

Marks out of 5: 3.5