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Advanced features

Researching your route

When planning your route, it’s good to know what the road or track quality will be like. 

Clicking on any section of your planned route will open up a popup, from where you can choose to see it in Google Street View. Note that Street View images are mostly only available for roads, not paths.

You can also click “See photos” to see pictures from the Geograph project, which has good coverage of paths.

Drawing straight lines

Although our route-planner tries to find the best cyclable route between any two places, there’ll be times when you want to take a direct route that it doesn’t permit – for example, on a new road that hasn’t made it into our mapping database yet.

You can draw a straight line to cross such a section. Put a via point on either side of your intended straight line section. (Don’t worry about the no doubt circuitous route it’ll choose.) Then click the first via point, and in the popup bubble, select ‘Go direct’. The route will change to take a straight line to the next via point.

Elevation

You can see an elevation profile for any route you plan. Just click the elevation button on the left.

Moving your mouse over the elevation profile will show that place on the map, and vice versa. If you drag the route, you’ll see that the elevation profile is updated as you do. The total climb and descent, and the steepest gradient, are listed in the corner of the profile.

You can even click ‘3D’ to see a 3D elevation profile of the route!

Route tools

There are two additional buttons on the left: one to reverse your route, one to undo the last change you made.

You can delete all the via points before or after a certain point. This is useful if you’re splitting a long route into several sections. Right-click the point (or click while pressing Command on a Mac), then choose ‘Delete before’ or ‘Delete after’.

Saving and printing your route

We don’t offer the feature to save your route here on the Worcestershire County Council website, but you can transfer it to cycle.travel, the website that powers our route-planner.

Click “Open in cycle.travel” and your route will be transferred across. You can then create an account on cycle.travel and save your route in that account. cycle.travel also offers facilities to print your route.

Reading the map

The map key

There’s a handy map key (or legend) that shows you what the road and symbol colours mean. Click the link at the corner of the screen, by the credits.

Your planned route

When you’ve planned a route, it’s highlighted in blue and green on the map. Blue for paved sections; green for unpaved.

You’ll see summary statistics on the left. These show how much there is of each road type:

From left to right: busy road, other road, paved cycleway/trail, unpaved trail, pushing section.

Different map layers

The ‘layer’ icon on the map allows you to switch to the OpenStreetMap map style, which is less clear but shows more features.

Cycle map help

Find out more about how to use our map and cycle route planner.

The basics

It’s this easy:

Adding more points

If the route doesn’t go the way you want, you can simply drag it. A new numbered ‘via point’ will appear.

You can also extend the route by clicking points on the map. On desktop: Tick the option on the left that says ‘Click map to add more points’, then click at the new end of your route. On mobile: Quickly double-tap (iPhone) or long-press (Android) the new end of your route.

You can remove a via point by clicking on it and selecting ‘Remove via’ in the popup.

Finding by street or town name

You can type street or town names for the start/end of your route. A pop-up menu will appear as you type – choose the matching place. Click ‘Get route’ when you’ve chosen the start and end.

Our map data doesn’t have house numbers recorded, so just type the street name and town, not the number.

You can add a via point at a named place, too. Click ‘Add at…’ and type the name.

On a road bike?

We aim to choose a balanced route that prefers smooth surfaces, but sometimes go off-road to avoid hills, busy roads or long detours. If you’re on a road bike, you might prefer to stay on tarmac at all times. Flick the switch from ‘Paths & roads’ to ‘Paved only’ to change this.

Round-trips

Journeys don’t have to be A–B: you can plan circular round-trips too. Choose your start and end points as per usual, then click ‘Round-trip’. We’ll try to find you a different journey for the way back. (Note that sometimes it won’t be different, particularly on short journeys or in areas with few roads.)

Route ideas

If you just want a ride but you don’t mind where, we can do that too. Click just one start place on the map, or type it next to ‘From:’, then click ‘Suggest a ride’. Up to three circular routes will show on the map:

Choose the one you want by clicking on it. You can drag the slider to change the distance.

Unpaved sections

All things being equal, we choose paved routes. But if a dedicated cycleway is unpaved, or it’d save a stretch on a busy or hilly road, we’ll sometimes choose an unpaved route instead.

On the basemap, unpaved trails are shown with brown dots or dashes; unpaved roads have dashed edges. When you plan a route, the unpaved sections are highlighted in green, contrasting with the usual blue.

If you want to stick to paved sections only, then change the toggle beneath the from/to places. You can even restrict just the section between two via points to paved-only: click the first via point to bring up a popup, and change ‘Go any way’ to ‘paved’.

What are your favourite signposted routes?

I’m working on adding more route guides to cycle.travel – not with the full stage-by-stage breakdown (that requires cycling the route, ideally) but with maps, photo galleries, and accommodation finder.

What signposted routes have you enjoyed and would like to see in a cycle.travel guide? I’m keen to hear suggestions.

Privacy policy

Logging in

You may log into cycle.travel’s app or website using an account you set up on the cycle.travel website, or using a third-party login (including Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple). This is solely a convenience so you don't have to click an email confirmation link.

When you log in with a third-party service, we may receive your name, email address, and/or user ID from that service. This is only stored on our server to allow you to log in. You may choose to publish journeys or travelogue posts using your name or email, but this is entirely optional. Journeys can be saved as ‘private’ in which case no-one will see your name.

We do not use any other user data from these services. We do not use your account to publish posts, tweets, etc. on that service.

If you have any questions or feedback, please email [email protected] from the email address with which you registered the account.

Privacy

When you register as a user of cycle.travel, we’re grateful for your trust in us, and we aim to remain worthy of that trust.

We will not share the information you give us (your name, email address and exact location) with anyone. We may use your generalised location to show more relevant content (for example, content relating to your nearest city), and your exact location to improve the site experience (for example, centering the map at the right point).

We do not collect any other personal information. However, you should be aware that by saving routes or other information, you may be volunteering your personal information. When you save a route, we offer an option to make the route private, which will conceal the route title and details. Routes that are not marked as private are publicly viewable.

If you choose to upload your cycle.travel routes to another service, the terms and conditions of that service will apply. Our integrations are ‘upload only’; we do not download your activity or route data from any other service.

cycle.travel is not intended for sole use by children. Please ensure you supervise children when using this app.

Mobile app

When you ride a route with the cycle.travel app, we may collect data about road conditions and rider speed. This data will be stored on our servers anonymously, without any information linking it to your account or any other personally identifying information, and is used solely to improve our routing calculations. You can disable this by changing the ‘Send route feedback’ setting within the app, or by refusing/disabling permission when asked to permit sensor usage.

Web cookies

We use cookies on the cycle.travel website for two purposes:

To help fund the site, we may run content from third-party advertisers and networks. We do not send any user data to these advertisers or networks. These ads may attempt to set cookies on some browsers; if you would prefer them not to, please check in your browser preferences, under ‘Privacy’ (or similar), that you have chosen a setting such as ‘Disable third-party cookies and site data’.

You may at any time inspect and delete your cookies using your browser settings.

Account deletion

If you want your account to be deleted, please email [email protected] from the email address with which you registered the account. All your saved routes and other content will be removed.

Right to be forgotten (GDPR)

If you believe that cycle.travel holds personal data about you, and you would like this to be erased, please email [email protected] with details of the information concerned. You can find out more about the right to be forgotten at gdpr-info.eu.

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