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 paved road, other paved road, unpaved road, paved cycleway/trail, unpaved trail, pushing section, ferry.

A few things you might spot on the map…

• Cycle network ‘nodes’: wayfinding points popular in the Netherlands and Belgium
• Mountain passes and saddles (they appear in the turn-by-turn directions too!)
• Fuel stations for sustenance in remote areas
• Bike hire stations in cities

Navigating the rural US

All map databases have incomplete coverage for roads and trails in the rural US, particularly the Midwest. In particular, surface information is often missing. cycle.travel takes a deliberately cautious approach and tries not to route you along such roads, which are very often unpaved tracks or worse. These roads are shown as thin single-dashed lines when you zoom in. 

If you know the surface of any such roads, we’d encourage you to create an account on OpenStreetMap and add that information.

Different map layers

You can choose OpenStreetMap, the OSM German Style, and CyclOSM as well as cycle.travel’s standard basemap.

cycle.travel supporters can choose from many extra maps – Ordnance Survey, IGN (France), Swisstopo, satellite imagery, and numerous others.