Are you the sort of rider that enjoys exploring new routes? Do you prefer riding quiet gravel rather than battling with traffic on sealed roads? Would you love an easy way to see all of the gravel roads and paths in your local area?
If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the above, you might want to check out Sherpa-Map, a route-mapping project that’s been in the works for less than two years now and that has some interesting potential.
Sherpa-Map is the creation of three riders and roommates from Wisconsin, USA – Eric Semianczuk (programmer), his twin brother David Semianczuk (UI/UX developer), and their friend Tim Struebing (system administrator). Eric told Escape that, with the three of them being “collectively addicted to cycling” and with gravel “the new hot trend”, “we needed to find gravel in a state that’s almost entirely paved”. The plan: build a software solution that would find that gravel for them.
At first glance, OpenStreetMap (OSM) seems like the perfect solution. An open-source community mapping project used by all the route-creation sites you’re already familiar with, OSM comprises a vast database of map details – including road surface definitions – all added manually by users around the world. But as impressive and useful as the database is, it’s far from complete, as Eric found out when he began work on Sherpa-Map. “The majority of roads in our area lacked a surface definition”, he explained. It wasn’t clear which roads were gravel and which ones weren’t.
“While it’s entirely possible to switch to the satellite view in a cycling routing app, zoom in, and inspect every section of the course manually, is that feasible?” Eric ponders on the Sherpa-Map website. “Are you going to try that each time? I’m certainly not.”
And so he and his housemates started working on an automated solution. Namely, using AI to look at satellite imagery of roads to help detect what surfaces they could expect under their tyres.
Back to that AI solution in a moment, but first let’s set the scene and look at the basics of Sherpa-Map.
What Sherpa-Maps can do
In its most basic use case, Sherpa-Map is very similar to other route builders you’ve probably used before. Select a start point for your ride, add some waypoints, select your end point, and the software will create a route between all those points for you. Drag and drop the route to any roads or paths you want to include – and away from any you don’t – and the route will update.
As with some other route builders, Sherpa-Map will give you an elevation profile showing which parts of the route are sealed, and which aren’t. And as with route builders like Strava’s, you can tell Sherpa-Map to prioritise gravel or paved surfaces when routing between waypoints. Likewise whether you feel like a hilly or flatter route.
But unlike with Strava’s route builder, the main mapping window in Sherpa-Map has a handy “Surface Overlay” you can turn on when starting to create your route. This will show which roads have what surfaces, making it easy to build a route that takes in as much gravel as you like.
Also unlike Strava [UPDATE: Strava can do this in its smartphone app, just not via its website], Sherpa-Map can generate a suggested route for you, from scratch. Just pick your start/finish location, how far you’d like to ride, which general direction you’d like to ride in, the sort of surface and hilliness you prefer, and Sherpa-Map will do the rest, suggesting a loop for you.
To get a better sense of Sherpa-Map’s routing functionality, I spent some time playing with the route builder, before going out and riding one of the routes it recommended.
I started out by requesting rides of around 15 km in my local area in out-eastern Melbourne, with a preference for gravel. The distances of the generated routes varied quite a bit – from around 8 km to 22 km – and these routes often seemed to include some amount of wiggly backstreet riding. But neither of these quirks were a problem in any way.
Eric explained that his routing algorithm is optimised for rides of around 30 km or greater, and that he is “planning to develop a shorter-distance-specific algorithm, both for shorter rides and for runners.”
In the end I settled on a suggested route of roughly 20 km, downloaded the GPX file to my computer, then uploaded that into the Strava Route Builder, which I could then open on my phone to follow once I was out on the bike.
After some early kilometres spent winding through unfamiliar but pleasant backstreets in Mitcham, the route dropped me onto a lovely little gravel path I’d once ridden a few years ago, but long forgotten about (see feature image). Returning there was a welcome surprise.
In Park Orchards, the route suggested I eschew a nearby bike path and instead head straight up a grass pipeline reserve. With gradients of more than 20% on wet grass, on a road bike, I figured deviating from the route and opting instead for the bike path was probably a better option.
Another suggested turn a little later on had me heading up a steep, clay walking track, again in lieu of a nearby, sealed bike track. That clay track ultimately went nowhere and so I returned to the bike path and carried on my way.
Quirky route suggestions like this are less a reflection of Sherpa-Map itself and more representative of the OpenStreetMap data it’s pulling from. The software saw paths that were unsealed and with that being the preference I’d selected, the route took me up there, gradient or actually rideability be damned. Eric explained that “OSM doesn’t do a great job differentiating unpaved singletrack from bike paths” but added that “I likely can pre-process all ‘bike paths’, checking for how many turns there are within a moving window of say above 100 m … and add a singletrack attribute, and adjust my routing profiles …”
The last section of the generated route saw me link up with one of my favourite local bike paths which was a pleasant way to end a short but eventful ride.
Visits to unrideable paths and meandering through backstreets mightn’t be ideal if you’re looking for a fast and efficient ride. But, if you’re looking for a ride that delivers a sense of discovery and exploration, then Sherpa-Map (much like a tool like Wandrer) has plenty to offer.
Of course, Sherpa-Map isn’t the first platform to offer this sort of route generation. Garmin, for example, has long offered such tools on its GPS units, and sites like Routeshuffle, RouteLoops, and Plotaroute do similar online. But having this functionality inside an all-inclusive route planner is very useful.
And Sherpa-Map has other features that are well worth a look.
Beyond the basics
On the left-hand side of Sherpa-Maps’ route creation screen are a bunch of additional overlay options to help better plan your rides. Open the Weather tab, select the time you plan to start your ride, and the site will overlay temperature and wind information on various parts of your route, calculating what the weather will be at the time you’re likely to arrive. Similarly, the Amenities tab shows you where you might find public toilets, cafes, water fountains, and other conveniences out on your route.
Then there are some additional tools to help plan your ride. The “Bicycle Calculator” can give you a useful estimate of how long a particular route might take you.
Drop in the GPX file of the route you want to ride, enter some information about your bike, your average power, even your CdA (aerodynamic drag), and you’ll get a sense of how long you might be out on the bike for. While functionality like this exists on other platforms, including Strava, Sherpa-Map allows you to go deeper.
“The inspiration of these tools was born from the fact that the three of us are always competing with each other, and have many bikes/tire options,” Eric explained. “The calculator app helps me figure out if I should choose MTB with gravel tires, road bike with gravel tires, gravel bike with MTB tires, etc. for an upcoming race that could have pavement, singletrack, etc.
“It also utilizes my brother’s medical schooling to provide an interesting outlook on the nutritional requirements the route may need.”
The “GPX Activity Racer”, much like Strava’s Flyby, allows you to compare your ride against others’, or indeed against your own previous efforts on the same route. Upload all of the GPX files you want to compare, select a common start point, and you’ll get a visual representation of each rider’s relative progress. It’s not as polished as Flyby, but being able to compare your ride against anyone’s, including your own – and not just those who were right with you at the time, like Flyby does – has some benefits.
“The GPX Racer is used to settle arguments,” Eric explained. “We’re always trying to see which one of us was fastest on some course over some year, or against last year’s performance, even if we arrived at certain sections at completely different times.
“So, we often create whole tools, similar to creating Sherpa to find gravel, simply to satisfy ourselves as cyclists, and because we specialize in web apps, we might as well make them public.”
But the most impressive feature of Sherpa-Map, and the one that makes it so useful for those of us looking for new gravel roads to explore, is the way it uses AI to determine surface types that aren’t classified in OpenStreetMap.
AI for surface recognition
The basics of Eric’s surface recognition software are simple enough. If the surface of a given road on the route isn’t known (i.e. not defined in OpenStreetMap), the software first downloads up-to-date satellite images of that road. Then, for various points along the road, it runs those images through a model that’s been trained on around 250,000 pre-classified satellite images, to help determine what the surface might be.
In all, as many as four different AI models are employed to help determine a road’s surface to an acceptable confidence level. If an answer is found, “I then re-render the overlay and rebuild the routing software with this additional data,” Eric explained.
Eric has now run this AI routine over the entirety of North America, Europe, and Australia – a huge computational task. “I aim to complete this for the whole world, state by state, country by country,” Eric said.
The results are quite visually striking.
You can see a slimmed down version of Eric’s surface classification process in real-time. Create a route, head to the Line menu and select Surface. Then select “AI Define Unknown” and you’ll see the app moving through the route, inspecting satellite images, trying to reclassify “unknown” sections of road into something more useful.
How it compares
Looking at Sherpa-Map from the outside, it’s this nifty approach to surface classification – and the gravel routing it makes possible – that sets Sherpa-Map apart from other, similar offerings. Eric says there’s something else that makes this project stand out.
“What sets us apart from Strava, Komoot, RideWithGPS, is our incredible ability to iterate,” Eric told Escape. “Sites like these (Strava, in particular) are slowly becoming more focused on generating more revenue, not features. We can pivot instantly and spend a month on something new and audacious, which may either fail or succeed.”
Eric points to the Bicycle Calculator tool, discussed above, as an example of this. While available as a standalone tool to calculate how long a ride might take, it’s now also included in Sherpa-Map’s main mapping screen too.
“After months of working on it, I was able to incorporate the 7,000+ lines of code directly into the Sherpa-Map website,” he said. “The ‘Est. Duration’ option performs hundreds of thousands (or millions, depending on the size of the route) of calculations, taking into account everything imaginable to try to determine where you might be at any given time.
“This small detail brings no revenue, is only mildly more accurate on simple routes (e.g., all paved) than a simple heuristic, and is something a large group paying teams of engineers would probably not bother with, but is the exact type of innovation that we can rifle through simply because we want it.”
Eric believes the fact Sherpa-Map was built in an apartment by three people who can work on whatever they want, does give it something special.
“Having no restrictions, and being able to test, experiment, and iterate to our heart’s content really means there’s practically no limit to where this project can go,” he said. “A button to generate coffee rides? Sure. A routing profile to try and keep you around greenery? Why not. A routing profile that avoids traffic and storms? Absolutely doable. With enough time, we’re hoping to add everything imaginable to build the perfect route.
“The grand idea is to use my own Natural Language Processing (NLP) AI, similar to ChatGPT, to let the user type, ‘Build me a 30 km route predominantly heading north, with one cafe stop’ and then edit it by stating ‘Actually, I want it to head a bit further north and include Pinecone Rd – it’s beautiful this time of year.’
“This is possible, but only barely … and I will absolutely spend entirely too much time trying to make it a reality.”
The road ahead
While still just a fledgling site with a small following, Sherpa-Map is starting to get some attention in gravel circles. The r/gravelcycling community on Reddit has been following the project since the start, and a post that Eric made on the sub-reddit recently generated enough interest that “it managed to kill our whole internet connection,” he said. “Surprisingly, this post even managed to surpass the vast majority of Unbound posts on the gravel cycling-specific subreddit, the week after Unbound.”
And with the sub-reddit’s response to the project being so positive, Eric and his collaborators are more inspired than ever to keep iterating on what they’ve made. Next on the menu is a new, cleaner user interface, some improvements to the AI routine to help work out how much of a route will be exposed to sun or wind, and even a phone app that can provide directions. But hanging over a project like this is a big, tough question: how to make money off something like Sherpa-Map? Because while Eric claims “our biggest motivation is simply seeing user activity on the site”, that sort of passion normally only goes so far.
“If I’m being perfectly honest, among the three of us, we have zero marketing, business, etc., experience,” Eric said. “We work on the site out of pure passion and enjoyment and have greatly appreciated the odd donation every month or two.
“Have we sunk thousands of dollars into this? Would we have sunk the same money into additional, probably-not-necessary bikes? Yep. Do we have any idea who would pay how much for what? Nope.
“As it stands, for the foreseeable future, everything is staying free. If we find something that we may want to monetize, it would probably be a suggested price, whereby you could pay what you feel it’s worth.”
In a space dominated by well-established heavy-hitters like Strava, Komoot, and RideWithGPS, Sherpa-Map is still in its infancy. At face value it lacks the polish, the community awareness, and in some cases the feature set of these bigger-name offerings, but that’s hardly a knock against it. For one thing, Sherpa-Map is already using the same routing engine, GraphHopper, as sites like Komoot and RideWithGPS (Strava uses a custom-built engine called RouteMaster).
And when you remember that Sherpa-Map is the work of just three guys in a sharehouse, using a home-built supercomputer that runs so hot it literally heated their apartment through the Wisconsin winter, their offering becomes all the more impressive. What they’ve been able to create with just a little bit of time, a whole heap of passion, and a bit of support from the gravel community, suggests quite a bit of promise, particularly if you’re the sort of rider that enjoys gravel roads and the joy of discovery.
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