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Mapping Bike Rides (Part IV)

We’re back once again to talk about my goal of mapping all of my bike rides! This time we’re trying out wanderer (or wanderer.to) not to be confused with wandrer (or wandrer.earth).

We mentioned wandrer.earth back in Part II, in case you forgot. It works with the data from Strava.

wanderer.to is totally different! It’s decentralized and self-hosted which means no corporation is getting your data. It’s open source and privacy first. The copy I have running on my own server has only one account… mine! No one else can login and see my data. If that appeals to you, wanderer might fit the bill.

There are a few servers out there running wanderer and it could be a cool thing for a local community or a group of friends to run. There is a demo server anyone can log into and upload their GPX files to try it out. I did this before installing it via Docker. It also uses federation via ActivityPub so servers (instances) can talk to each other. Since I’ve only got my server I haven’t dug into this yet…

Whew! I should talk about what wanderer does! Just like the others you upload your GPX files and it creates maps using the data. The thing is, wanderer, like many of the other applications that are similar, is more about sharing trails, and recording trails.

(I say “trails” as in routes people share for others to ride. I don’t really do that… I just want to see my own rides. One thing wanderer does is look at your GPX files and try to filter out duplicates. Since I ride the same route to work every day it kept flagging duplicates, but I want those duplicates because they are my rides.)

wanderer is a self-hosted, open source, GPX loading-map making application that shows all of my rides, but it’s also sort of a weird fit for that. I mean, it totally works! And I don’t have to subscribe, or be limited to just the last 50 rides, so it’s a winner in many ways.

So yeah, I guess it’s Mission Accomplished for wanderer! It’s still in development, and I am not using it exactly as it’s meant to be used (which is fine) but this isn’t the end of my quest. It is pretty cool though, and I’m glad I’ve got an install to play with! It even forced me to write some new Python code to further clean up my GPX files.

The idea of wanderer is a good one! And a few people have created their own similar things. Nicolas Hoizey has one, though I cannot read it because it’s in French. (Source code is available!) But wait, there’s more French stuff I can’t read! There is David Larlet’s offering Source code is available!) So yeah, what is with these French people!?

These posts have been fun, but in the next one I’ll start to talk about my solution… yes, I do have one! :)

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Mapping Bike Rides (Part III)

In my research on methods of producing a map of all of my bike rides I stumbled upon gpx.studio. It lets you upload GPX files and it maps them. At first I was concerned it was run by some company that was going to want me to subscribe or sell me some services, but luckily it’s “free, ad-free, and open source” though you can support gpx.studio through Ko-fi and it looks like Mapbox supports them through their map tiling service.

Oh, a bit more about a “map tiling service”, which is a provider of (duh!) map tiles! As I started generating my own interactive maps I discovered these services, some are free, many are commercial, and most of the commercial ones have tiered service so you can at least try them out. Anyway, back to trying out gpx.studio!

I loaded all of my GPX files into the page and it renders all of the routes! It tries to alternate through different colors which is probably useful for most people, but not for my purposes.

You can of course just load a single file at a time… Here’s one of my rides to work. It’s a nice, clean interface, and for the thing it does, it does it well.

Here’s another tile set (different map view) showing my ride in Palm Springs, California back in April. The brown stuff on the left are mountains. I’m glad I got to do a bike ride in another state, and hope to do more of that (and other countries!) in the future.

Okay, so gpx.studio is pretty cool, and it’s a free tool without the nagware that so many sites have nowadays. While it probably isn’t right for my goal (a single map showing all of my bike rides) it’s worth checking out if you want an easy way to see your GPX data on a map. It’s actually got a lot more features, which you can read about in the docs!

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Mapping Bike Rides (Part II)

In Mapping Bike Rides (Part I) I covered the goal, to map out my bike rides, so I could see everywhere I’ve biked since February 2024. I was hoping the tools I already used could work with the data I created to do so. Such was not the case… yet. So let’s look at some other solutions.

The post Squadrats by Bike talked about how I was using Strava to move data from Apple Fitness/Apple Health into Strava just to get it to Squadrats. I actually do like Squadrats, maybe because they are not a tech company based in the US, maybe because I don’t get hit constantly with annoying messages to subscribe or go pro or whatever would extract money from me.

And the Strava map? It’s useless for seeing all my rides… unless I haven’t figured out how to do it yet. Maybe that’s why third-party services offer mapping that do.

Strava does offer some neat data, but ultimately it doesn’t seem to achieve my goal of a giant map showing all my rides. (Not by itself anyway, but as an intermediary it certainy plays a role.) I have friends who use Strava, and I guess it’s fun to see their rides on occasion, but I keep getting “awards” for riding fast, which is silly, because I am hauling ass on an ebike to get to work, not pushing myself for ultimate fitness or whatever.

But wait! There is Wandrer, which does show all my rides, though it also gets the data from Strava. Also, with Wandrer “You’re limited to your 50 most recent activities. Get all of your previous activities added (and more features) for only US$30 / year.” so once again we’ve hit the paywall of this mapping.

Look, I get it… Wandrer, just like any other online service, has expenses, and (good) mapping isn’t always free. So I am certainly willing to compromise. Others will happily fork over $30 USD per year for a solution, but I’m happy to host my own solution or write my own code, so I’ll be doing that. (And yes, there are more posts coming!)

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Mapping Bike Rides (Part I)

I have an interest in knowing where I’ve been. Since February of 2024 I’ve been riding a bike, almost daily, and I started just riding in the same places, but as I would do longer rides I would always check out the map created by Apple Fitness. (I use an Apple Watch to start my “workouts” and it sends the data to my iPhone.)

Apple Fitness gives you a map like this. It’s fine. The map is dark, the line for your route is bright yellow. It’s simple, and it works. (It’s the “Apple Way”?) You can switch to a satellite view as well, which I find useless.

Matt recommended I try RunGap which I like because it just imports your data from Apple Fitness and provides a few additional features, and a few more mapping options, as well as showing more data.

One thing I eventually wanted was a way to see all of my rides on one big map. I was trying to figure out if I could use the data from RunGap to make such a map…

I use the free version of RunGap. I should mention that along the way I found my data. Now, if you want to export your data from RunGap it’s $14.99 USD per year for a subscription, or $4.99 for three months. All I want to do is a local data dump. RunGap lets you export to like 30+ services, so I get that they want to get paid to support all that. BUT! in the Export options are two things: CSV Export and Backup Data. The CSV Export requires a paid subscription, but the Backup Data option lets you create a copy of the SQLite database the app uses, which is full of all sorts of great data! (Though you have to reverse engineer the relationships!)

So I’ve poked around at the SQLite database, got some interesting stuff from it by writing lots of Python, but ultimately I decided it was not going to work for mapping my rides…

I’ve mentioned Apple Fitness but not Apple Health. On the iPhone is another app called Apple Health, and you can export all of your data from there! The thing is, it is slow, and it is all your data. You don’t want to do an export every day, but once a year or once a month is not too painful.

After exporting my data I got a ZIP file that was 90MB which expands to nearly 2GB! So much data… But there’s a folder named workout-routes which is about 214MB and is filled with GPX files! A GPS File is “GPS Exchange Format” and it contains waypoints, routes, and tracks. I use Apple Fitness for tracking walks and bike rides. That’s how those maps get created.

Okay, this is getting long so I’ll end it here but Part II will continue the adventure of mapping my bike rides!

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Squadrats by Bike

When I first head of Squadrats I thought it was “Squad Rats” like some sort of cool bike gang name. It is not. I think it comes from Quadrat. Anyway, it’s a web site/service that tracks where you’ve been. It could be by walking, hiking, or biking. It’s sort of a game? I don’t play though, I just like to see my own data.

Check out the rules.

  1. Leave your house.
  2. Record your activity with a phone or any GPS device.
  3. Collect squadrats.

Ride, run, walk, swim, boat, but use your own muscles, wind, or gravity. Motor vehicles (except e-bikes) are not allowed.

So yeah, it’s sort of a game like Pokémon GO I guess…

To use Squadrats you need to get your data into Squadrats. When I do a bike ride (or a walk) I use my Apple Watch to “start a workout”. Last year I started using (the free version of) RunGap to get a better view of my bike riding data than (the free version of) Apple Fitness gives me. I still use RunGap, which is great for some things. If you want to export your data from RunGap you have to pay though. (Note: You can get your data in a SQLite database if you use the “backup” feature, which is free… I should write up a post about that.)

Where was I? Oh yeah! RunGap made me wish there was a feature where I could see all of my rides on a single map so I thought about ways to do that on my own. None were easy, so I started looking for solutions and found Squadrats. Data can get to Squadrats via Strava, but I don’t use Strava. Well, I didn’t use Strava, but I do now, because it’s the way to get my ride data from Apple Fitness/Health to Squadrats… Strava is the intermediary between the two.

But Strava is weird for me, because I feel like it’s also a “competition thing” and I don’t care about competing with people, I just want my data to flow somewhere. Strava makes it look like I ride a bike really fast, but I’m just on an ebike commuting to work.

I like most things about Squadrats when it comes to displaying my ride data. It’s great to see a map of where I have been, and you can narrow things by choosing “All time”, “Last 7 days”, etc. and then look at Squadrathinos, Yards, Yardhinos, Ubersquady-somethings, etc. All the terminology is a little weird but whatever.

There is a “Leaderboard” and while I’m not out to compete with anyone but myself it’s interesting to see the data. I managed to get about two months worth of data into Strava (and Squadrats) by doing an import from Apple Fitness/Health when I signed up for Strava, but it seems like I can’t easily do that import again, so there’s not a simple way to load all my past data. (There is a way. Looks like I can do it 25 files at a time… I may do that.)

Squadrats is neat, and I do like it… But! I am working on some code to take all of my GPX files from Apple Fitness/Health and plot every ride on a map. I’ll be posting about that soon. Stay Tuned!

Update! I manually uploaded all of 2025’s rides to Strava now and they have flowed into Squadrats so my map covers a lot more area!