6 steps away from a beautiful cycling route! (tips)

There are many exsisting planned cycling routes that are of very high quality and reliability. But it's also fun to plan your own cycling route where you can express your specific preferences. Would you like to pass by specific spots or would you like to lengthen or shorten the route?

Contrary to what you might think, this is not so difficult. At Bikerouting we offer an easy-to-use cycling route planner with functionalities aimed at efficiently mapping out a personalized route. You can use our route planner for free. So open our route planner in a new tab on www.bikerouting.com/routeplanner and follow the steps below!

1.             Location services or directly to your starting point

The website will automatically ask with a pop-up to access your location. You are free to accept this. The advantage is that the map immediately moves to your position, allowing you to start a route faster from where you are now.

You can also enter an address/municipality/city in the 'from' text box. This will then become your starting point. To make the map move to this point, click on the button at the bottom right that zooms out until the total route is visible.

2.             Before you start, set your route preferences

We have added a specific functionality to the route planner to take into account your specific cycling preferences during the planning. To select these, click on the little button in the top right corner of the route planner menu. The button represents a junction with a cogwheel.

 There are six settings to choose from:

• Use Bicycle Friendly Roads:With this option, the route planner tries to drive as far as possible along roads that are "bicycle friendly". This takes into account the location and presence of a bicycle lane, the speed at which cars are allowed to drive and whether the road is already part of a cycle route

• Mainly via Node Network:This setting aims to have the route go along bicycle nodes as much as possible. The route will then mainly go from one cycle node to another.

• Through Fields and Villages:This preference will have the route go along small local roads as much as possible, using existing local cycle routes. This way you will pass through small villages and cycle on quieter country roads.

• Mainly Bicycle Highways:With this option, the route planner tries to drive as much as possible along bicycle highways. It is important to note that these highways are often not yet fully realised, which means that there is a 'wish line' on the map but no cycle path has been realised yet. Please pay attention to this when planning your cycling route!

• Fastest route:This setting for planning a bicycle route aims to get you from A to B as quickly as possible. This means that you will not immediately end up on the most bicycle-friendly roads, such as main roads between towns.

• Custom:You can also shift and set the underlying parameters yourself according to your own preferences. This way you can combine different preferences to arrive at your own favorite parameter.

You can also choose which points of interest are shown on the map. For example, you can choose to show some cultural places, to see which beautiful castles you like to cycle along. By switching off the other points you get more overview on your map. It is also possible to simply disable all points. You can find these options on the button to the left of the route preferences.

3.             From A to B in seconds

We have made it possible to easily plan a nice quality cycling route from A to B using the selected cycling preferences. For example, when you enter an end point, the route is automatically calculated based on the entered preferences. So in a few clicks and seconds you get a qualitative cycling route from A to B. This is obviously very useful if you want to create a multi-day cycling vacation in a few clicks. You can always modify the planned route locally, for example to add a certain landmark to the route. You can simply add the point shown, for example a castle', by clicking on the icon on the map.

4.             A bicycle tour

If you only have limited time for a (short) bike ride in the neighborhood, it is obviously useful to create your own route in the immediate vicinity. You can do this easily by marking a few key points on the map and creating a circuit. The route planner will then do the rest of the work based on the chosen preferences! It is best to enter the same address as the starting and ending point.

5.             Do-it-yourself

You can of course plan your trip all by yourself without the route planner doing it for you. The map itself shows the existing local routes and the cycling junctions which you can use as a guide. By clicking on the map, new waypoints are added and you can shape your cycling route. Of course you can remove points, drag them, drag the route itself, ...

6.             Download and ride!

When your cycle route is ready, you can easily download the gpx file by clicking on the "download gpx" button in the route planner menu. In this way you can transfer this file to your favourite bike GPS or application and start your cycling route. You also have the option of saving your cycling route and later modifying it again, downloading it and so on. For this you can easily create an account in a few clicks.

 Ps: you can also always use existing routes on our website, but also modify them within our route planner!