Hi,

Looking for a route planner, that will allow plotting across bridleways/lanes, but also across footpaths of possible (potential short cheeky cut-throughs to join bridleways!)

Have tried wheresthepath3 and bikehike, both good but don’t follow along a route when clicked along an obvious marked route/trail. Tries to always follow a road or a straight line.
After using MapMyRide for road rides, which follows a road when you click further along it, using these two websites seems laborious and basically makes a route of short straight sections?

Any other people are recommending, using OSM maps on the garmin if that makes any difference?

Cheers

RideWithGPS, set to “optimize for cycling”.

Then copy it into Suunto or Wahoo.

Ultimately it’s the underlying mapping that restricts what you can do in this respect. A road is just a line in the mapping marked as passable by cars so the routing algorithm will mark it. Unless someone has done the same for bridleways and footpaths and updates the maps then it’s down to manual entry I’m afraid. I’ll use either bikehike or Strava and if the auto-routing does something weird then just undo one and go into manual mode.

Unless you are in an area with lots of paths/tracks very close together then a straight line approximation is usually more than good enough especially if it’s obvious on the ground.

Bikehike is the best, you just have to manually plot the course on tracks etc. It does follow some of them. The data is the same whatever the program, don’t know of anything that will follow tracks and lock to them.

I find the Strava route planner best of all at the moment select satellite and heatmap and deselect popular (I think as I’m not in front of it). If it doesnt plot where you want undo and place a waymarker closer to the point where a path splits. Not a very good description of what is a very intuitive bit of software.

https://www.gpsies.com/home.do#5_51.330349838580894_10.452764272689823_hikebike

https://www.walklakes.co.uk/maps/

Create a log in and you get OS mapping to 1:25000

Best one I’ve found , https://cycle.travel/map

Justgoride

Cheers, few new ones to try. BikeHike maybe looks like was one of the better one after all!

I use strava route planner, just because it’s dead straightforward to use, however, I’ll study an os map first (either online or a paper version) to familiarise myself with the area I’m planning on riding, so you can suss out about in the area (fire roads, farms, pubs, car parks, café stops etc) as well as checking out the terrain (moorland, bogs, sink holes) and what you can *ehem* legally ride on.

If you have a PC or small laptop then it’s handy to have the Bing OS map (cos that’s free) open on one screen, or on your phone and then your Strava route planner open on another screen, then you can plot your route better that way.

Plotaroute is also very good: https://www.plotaroute.com/

You can enter a distance and it will generate a point-to-point or a circular route.

I just tried https://cycle.travel/map because I found the map colours and detail very easy to spot cycle lanes/routes but when I removed a plot point it would’nt let me add another new plot point.

@philb88

nickdavies has already touched on this but just to check…

when you are using bikehike you can untick the ‘follow road’ box in the bottom right and then click anywhere on the map to make the track. So for offroad routes once that’s unticked you can manually follow any path you like.

You can also map out the track either on the Google map panel or the OS map panel to follow bridleways etc. On the Google map panel switching to satellite is good for following off road trails.

Finally you can toggle the map sizes as well to make either the Google Maps/ OS maps panel bigger or smaller.

A couple of other hints for bikehike:

– Make sure to go to Options and change the Follow Road mode from Driving to Walking.
– If you want to click anywhere to make a track you don’t have to untick the Follow Road box, just click your waypoints in the smaller right hand OS screen and it will go in a straight line rather than following the Google routing. Good when you’re frequently switching modes!

Helpful Tips, thanks.