It's already since last year that we added a great set of statistics on the Route-page to inform you about the difficulty of a route. Check out this example.
It includes

• the general difficulty level and specific difficulty levels
• total ascent
• max. slope
• length
• average slope
• net ascent
• total descent

Quite some users with GPS devices were measuring different statistics so we looked deeper into the problem. Have a look at this example:


The blue line is the raw data you get from your GPS or from a height model as we use on RouteYou to calculate the profile You see the jagged shape of the profile. If you count all the small climbs, you get quite an exageration of the cumultative height you have to climb. So you get free credit for these climbs but they don't really exist in reality. That's what we solved. For those who don't want to know much about the algorithm behind it, just compare the red line we now use vs the blue jagged line. It's obvious that this is a much beter representation of the real climb.

For those wo want to know a little bit more about it: we used several filter and generalization techniques and it showed that the Douglas-Peucker algorithm with a specific set of variables gave us the best result. The Douglas-Peucker algorithm  is used as a generalization technique in mapping, but as you can see, it works also nicely on vertical mapping problem such as the profile calculation.
We recaculated all the routes you created so you can enjoy the better results!


If you want to read more about this topic, check out the help

• about route statistics
• about  total ascent
• about generalization