Climb is the number many of us check first after a hike. It sounds simple: add up every meter you went up. It turns out that "add up every meter" is exactly where things go wrong.
In May we went rafting down the Dunajec. A river only flows downhill: about 90 meters in four and a half hours. Guru Maps said we had climbed 1,065 meters.
Here is how Guru Maps counts elevation gain, why that happened, and what we changed in the next update.
A two-kilometer walk through a park and a two-kilometer climb up a mountain should not share the same clock. Until now, most routing engines gave them one anyway — and the result was always the same: the map says twenty minutes, the trail takes an hour.
Guru Maps now does better. Pedestrian directions account for the shape of the ground under your feet, so the estimated time reflects the climb ahead instead of an optimistic flat-walking pace. It's a big win for hiking, where the gap was largest — and every walking route benefits, right down to a hilly street across town.