USA - Scenic Byways GPX files needed

NotThePainter

New member
The USA has quite a lot of info on scenic drives, the FHWA calls them America's Byways (https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/byways/byways) and you can also find the designation National Scenic Byway, the best of which are named All-American Roads (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Scenic_Byway)

The most useful mapping site I've found is https://scenicbyways.info and if you click on the byway you can get directed to furkot.com which lets you download a GPX file of that single byway.

I'd like to download these GPX files directly. I'm pretty certain that these GPX files are federally government sourced, but I can't find a directory of them. Scraping furkot.com may not be legal and it will certainly be tedious.

Is anyone aware of such a database? Thanks!
 

NotThePainter

New member
I bought a Furkot pass and download all 31 GPX files for the All American ones, like I suspected it was tedious. I should probably grab the others but wow, there's a lot of them.
 

axlesandantennas

Approved Vendor
Interesting topic. I looked at a couple of the native shapefiles* and it looks like something that I could covert into GPX for dissemination. The only issue is that we would have to trust that these files are accurate, or at least trust the end user is willing to stop if the gpx/gps takes them to a cliff or body of water.


*shapefile is normally the start point of gpx files. In my experience, they are created in a GIS environment and then exported/ converted to GPX. Although some are created in the GPS and then exported for direct use as GPX.
 

NotThePainter

New member
Interesting topic. I looked at a couple of the native shapefiles* and it looks like something that I could covert into GPX for dissemination.

*shapefile is normally the start point of gpx files. In my experience, they are created in a GIS environment ...

Oh that is so neat. Can you tell us where you got the shapefiles? I could try some conversions. And yeah, I think we'll just have to trust that the users don't drive off a cliff, the whole point of these roads is to be looking out the window, not down at your phone!
 

axlesandantennas

Approved Vendor
Oh that is so neat. Can you tell us where you got the shapefiles? I could try some conversions. And yeah, I think we'll just have to trust that the users don't drive off a cliff, the whole point of these roads is to be looking out the window, not down at your phone!
Not down at the phone? You have too much faith my friend haha!

The files so far that I have found are part of a much larger database. I'm not trying to sound evasive, but I am not terribly sure you can actually get to them from a general search engine. Additionally, to the best of knowledge, there is no "right click" and save function on the databases. You have to open them in a GIS platform and go from there.
 

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