Mad-for-it walking folks Walkit.com have added a useful and unique feature to their online route mapping service – circular walks.
The idea is both simple and brilliant: if you fancy a short lunchtime stroll or a calorie busting urban trek, simply type in your chosen location, input your walking speed and you can quickly plan a circular walk from 15 minutes up to 4 hours.
Sample walks
Some example walks have already been offered for your perambulating pleasure:
30 minute walk from Kings Cross Station, London (medium pace)
1.25 hour walk from St Andrew Square, Edinburgh (fast pace)
2 hour walk from the Bullring, Birmingham (slow pace)
15 minute walk from the Town Hall, Manchester (fast pace)
Printing updated
Printing maps off the site has also been improved, with three options now offered:
* Print map and written directions
* Print written directions
* Print map
The first option also includes the full stats (e.g. calories etc) and the hill profile.
Oops!
We’ve been using Walkit.com for some time, and it’s a great place for planning urban walking routes, with the site serving up your journey time, calorie burn, step count and carbon saving for each journey.
Some things need tweaking though: typing in ‘London/Oxford Circus’ as a starting point brought up a ‘We couldn’t find the location you typed’ error, and then the whole site went down as we were writing this review (no doubt as result of journos all trying out the new feature!).
Inputting the location is a bit daft too: it suggest you type in ‘London Eye’ but then still insists that you select ‘London’ as the city from the drop-down above – and even when we did that, it still couldn’t find the location!
Tellingly, their press release also included a request for C++, Linux, mySQL coders, so if this is your kind of thing, maybe give them a holler – they need help!
If the site’s not working for you now, try again later as it’s well worth a visit.
Mike – thanks for the positive comments, and the challenging ones!
As you say, we had some capacity problems due to high interest in the new feature. Things should be better now, and we’re working on solutions to try and ensure it doesn’t happen again.
The London Eye problem should be solved too.
You can save London as your ‘home’ city by clicking on the ‘Walk here often?’ button above the map – that way you don’t have to keep on selecting it from the drop-down.
Cheers for the feedback Jamie.
One other thing: the site only offers one route for each location. It would be great if it could serve up a variety of walks of the same length/time – so you can plot different walks in your area for your lunchtime.
In the pipeline too!