You are here. You want to ride your bike to there. Use our Route Planner to find the best way to get there. We’ll show you how to get there, the amount of climbing you’ll endure, and more.
Go to our Mobile Route Planner tutorial if planning in the Ride with GPS app.
Create a Route
To get started with the route planner feature, click Route Planner at the top menu bar of the website.
- Jump to Home If you’ve set your home location in your profile preferences, you can click HOME in the blank Enter Location bar.
- Remove Marker If you used the Jump to Home or Jump to Location and want to remove the tear drop it has placed on the map, click REMOVE MARKER.
To plot your route using underlying map routing data, select the Add to Route tool and a routing optimization to snap your route to roads, paths, or trails. The Add to Route tool will automatically create a cuesheet as you click along the route which you will see appearing on the left side of the Route Planner. The Add to Route with the chosen routing optimization will go along any path you take that has routable data and will not stay to just paved roads.
The white dots that appear are Control Points and are what is used to constrain your route between each set of clicks. The more control points you have the more your route will stay in one place when editing or dragging your route elsewhere.
Avoiding Control Point Issues: While planning a route, a common issue that may pop-up is a missing or incorrect cue. This is caused by clicking an intersection. This pop-up will give you the alert and oppurtunity to undo your last click on the map.
Learn how to fix Incorrect Cue Sheet Entries
Draw Lines To activate Draw Lines, click Add to Route and then Select Draw Lines. Using this tool does not create cues, nor snap to the roads.
We recommend using this sparingly.
Use Draw Lines to get your route line to go through a short area that doesn’t seem to want to work with the routing engine. This could be a parking lot, unmarked street, unmarked pedestrian cut-throughs, or countless other reasons that the routing information might not be available.
When you have Add to Route selected, you can choose your routing style to best suit your activity.
- Walking – prioritize based on safety for walking. This routing will not be based on traffic laws such as one-way streets, but will use multi-use paths.
- Cycling – prioritize based on safety for cycling. Routes will use multi-use and bike paths, but may not be available in all areas.
- Driving – prioritize based on shortest distance.
When in cycling mode, you may get unpredictable results in some areas. This is because the routing system will not let you route along a certain stretch of the road, instead diverting you to a sidestreet. In some cases, this can cause funny loops and uturns. If you notice this, we recommend switching to Driving mode.
See Routing Style in action.
See Switching Map Styles for more details.
For a quick shortcut, type the letters “U” or “R” on your keyboard to perform these actions.
- Units Switch between Imperial ft/mi or Metric m/km.
- Show Cue Icons These are helpful for reviewing the route and indicating location of a cue.
- Auto Center The map will center on every click.
- Enable Scrollwheel Zoom Use the scroll wheel on your mouse or zoom gesture on your trackpad to zoom in/out on the map.
- Enable Selection Zoom Select portions of the elevation profile to zoom into a specific area.
- Enable Distance Markers Distance indicators that are automatically placed a calculated distance depending on the route.
- Show POIs Show or hide all the Points of Interest icons if your route contains them.
- Generate Cue Sheet While Planning Best to leave this option enabled so that the cue sheet is automatically generated for use on a printed cue sheet and mobile app.
- Keyboard Shortcuts Pops up a quick reference to the Planner’s keyboard shortcuts.
Route Tools
- Out and Back When planning a route where you want to use the same route when returning, plan the first half of the route then click OUT AND BACK to have the system automatically generate the return cues.
- Reverse Route When planning a route such as a two-day ride where you want to switch the start and end points, Click REVERSE ROUTE. The system will switch the start and end points then update the cue sheet accordingly.
See Switching Map Styles for more details.
Select Show More options to add images, specify activity type or to save a manually logged ride.




