Several weeks ago, my bicycle finally got fixed, after being abandoned in a broken state for a long time.

Before that, I didn’t even know that my bicycle was actually broken.

All I knew was that this bicycle was really, really, really tiring to use. Even a short-distance trip was enough to tire me out for the whole day.

I didn’t know that this was caused by something being broken, which meant I had to put in (approximately) twice the effort to make it move (citation needed).

At that time, I simply blamed my own weak body. “Maybe I’m not strong enough to wield this bicycle,” I thought, dejected, considering giving up my whole cycling career prematurely.

Then, one random day, one of my family members used that bicycle, noticed something wrong with it, fixed it, and then it was finally ridable without needing much energy and force.

Alright. Now I can use my bicycle again, I guess.

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For short trips, I usually prefer a bicycle to a motorcycle, for several reasons, you name it : hiking gas prices, the need to reduce our own carbon footprint to save the Earth (back then I took the mandatory environmental college course and thanks to that I’m still brainwashed so hard about the need to reduce my own carbon footprint), a nice opportunity to exercise my body, and the previous trauma of using a motorcycle and then suddenly having the engine not start so I had to walk the motorcycle to the nearest repair shop which turned out to be not near at all. Yeah, plenty of reasons.

So this afternoon, I decided to take a long trip to several places in my town, using my recently fixed bicycle.

I started around 4 PM and went home again around 6 PM.

Now it’s night, I’m sitting in front of my laptop, and getting curious : how many kilometers did I traverse this afternoon while cycling?

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I didn’t bring a proper GPS device to record my trip this afternoon, but I remember each path that I took today. So, what should I do to calculate the distance?

At first, I tried BRouter.

My plan was, I’m gonna put several of the key places from my trip over there, hoping that its routing engine would show my actual path. After that, I could keep notes of the distance statistics.

But I met several problems.

First, putting several key places into that web UI is hard. There’s no “right click -> show context menu” to add/remove coordinates.

Second, the routing engine itself. It doesn’t show my actual path. There are several routing presets over there. I tried several, but none of them actually showed the path I had taken.

So I tried another alternative solution. This time, the OpenStreetMap.org homepage.

This time, the “right click -> show context menu” feature exists. I can pick “directions from here” and “directions to here” easily by using this neat feature.

But the problem is, it only allows two coordinates: from here and to here. Meanwhile, my trip consisted of plenty of intermediate places. There’s no such feature on OpenStreetMap.org.

So I tried another alternative solution. The OpenStreetMap.org homepage shows several “brands” of routing engines: GraphHopper, OSRM, and Valhalla.

I tried OSRM at first.

Alright. On the OSRM demo page, now I can add plenty of intermediate places. Not just “from here” and “to here.”

But it’s still difficult to properly place a coordinate in this web UI.

It says “press enter to drop a marker,” but nothing happened when I pressed Enter.

Also, when plenty of intermediate points are involved, I can’t add the “second” and “more” intermediate points. When I click on the map, it only changes the first intermediate point, even though I intended to add more intermediate points.

Alright, next. Valhalla.

From their GitHub repository, I went to their documentation page.

At the very bottom of that page, I saw this :

“valhalla-app: A React-based web app for Valhalla, powering https://valhalla.openstreetmap.de/.”

So I opened that link.

And finally, it works properly.

The right-click -> context menu feature shows “directions from here,” “add as via point,” and “directions to here.” Basically, all of my current needs are satisfied.

Then, we can add plenty of intermediate waypoints. It’s easy to delete them and rearrange their order.

And regarding the routing preset, the “pedestrian” preset works well for me.

That preset won’t go “over-creative” to find advanced detours that work well for cars and motorcycles. Instead, it picks the route in a “greedy algorithm” style, which works very well in my context. All of the paths I actually took previously were successfully predicted by using this pedestrian preset.

Thus, by using the Valhalla instance on the OpenStreetMap.de server, I finally uncovered the truth behind my bicycle trip this afternoon.

2.3 km : home - barber
0.8 km : barber - clothes shop A
0.5 km : clothes shop A - clothes shop B
1.7 km : clothes shop B - cake shop
1.2 km : cake shop - home

2.3 + 0.8 + 0.5 + 1.7 + 1.2 = 6.5 km

Alright. 6.5 km distance for today.