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When planning long routes on the website, cycle.travel speeds up your route calculation by not showing turn-by-turn directions. This has a side effect of making the total ascent/descent calculations less accurate. You can improve accuracy by clicking ‘Show turn-by-turn directions’ on the left.
Calculating the total climb of a ride is notoriously difficult.
cycle.travel, like most route-planners, uses a worldwide grid of elevation data. When it’s calculating the elevation for a route, it looks up each point on a grid, and works it out by averaging the nearest points. It then calculates out the amount you’ll climb over the course of your ride by looking at the elevation difference between points.
Sounds simple? If only. On its own, this method leads to a lot of little fluctuations that aren’t reflected in the road/path you’ll ride. It doesn’t take any account of tunnels or bridges, where you’re not riding at ground level. And in areas where the road follows a steep-sided valleys, like the Alps, it can sometimes appear that the road is further up the hill than it actually is – causing lots of little ups and downs that aren’t there.
cycle.travel does a lot of extra calculation to minimise these effects and make the total figure more accurate. We think our figures are among the most accurate there are. But because different route-planners (and GPS units) use their own calculation methods, comparing figures from two sites will invariably result in a discrepancy. We’d suggest that you use the total climb as a guide to determining which of two cycle.travel routes will be the hilliest, rather than as a gospel fact.
Follow these tips to minimise battery usage when navigating with the app.
The biggest draws on battery life are your screen and your phone network. By using each one less, you can navigate for hours more.
To reduce screen use, tap the Settings button, then App settings, and select Dim between turns. This will dim the screen to minimum brightness between turns. The screen will automatically light up on the approach to a turn. At any time, tap the screen to restore the brightness.
To absolutely minimise screen use, first make sure voice instructions are turned on: tap the Settings button, then App settings, then make sure Announcements is set to Spoken. Then, when navigating, use your phone’s sleep/side button to turn the screen off. cycle.travel will continue to give you spoken directions even though the screen is off.
Once you’ve planned your route, you can navigate entirely offline (i.e. without internet connection) to save battery.
Download your planned routes to your phone by tapping the Routes button and finding the route you want. Then:
The route is now downloaded to your phone and can be opened at any time, even without internet access.
Next, download the basemap for the area you’re cycling in. Tap the Settings button then Offline map. Tap the areas you want to download, and then tap Download. The basemap for these areas will be downloaded. Note that you can only use the cycle.travel/Wayfarer maps offline, and not any other maps such as Ordnance Survey or OpenStreetMap.
With both your route and the basemap downloaded to your phone, you can now put it in airplane mode and navigate without internet access.
Only if you’re currently navigating on a route. If you don’t have a route open, GPS will not be used in the background.
On Android, you might still see a notification saying “cycle.travel is using your location to navigate”. This is an artefact of the way that Android works, but in fact cycle.travel isn’t using your location unless you’re navigating on a route.
Your supporter benefits are linked to your email address. If you can’t see your supporter benefits, please check you’re using the same email address throughout.
If you signed up as a supporter using Patreon, the email address you used for Patreon should match the one used on your cycle.travel account.
It can take up to 20 minutes for cycle.travel to recognise supporter status changes from Patreon.
Gift membership: Unfortunately Patreon doesn’t communicate gift memberships to cycle.travel, and we are not able to turn them off at Patreon. Please avoid using Patreon’s gift membership option if possible. If you’ve signed up before seeing this, please email us at info@cycle.travel and we’ll try to fix it.
If you use ‘Sign in with Apple’ on your iPhone, and select ‘Hide my email address’, cycle.travel can’t see your email address. If you already have a cycle.travel account, that means that we can’t match it up.
To avoid this, make sure you always use the same method to sign in:
If you’ve installed the app on a new phone, or reinstalled the app, it might not have remembered your previous subscription. In the cycle.travel app, make sure you’ve signed in; tap Settings; choose Account status; then:
Please email info@cycle.travel if you’re still encountering issues.
I hope cycle.travel is finding great rides for you.
I'm Richard and I make cycle.travel to find the sort of routes that I like - low traffic, great scenery, and enjoyable to ride.
You don't have to "go premium" or "unlock regions" to use cycle.travel. But if you're enjoying the website and app, I'd love it if you were to become a supporter. A small contribution helps keep the map servers running and means I can spend more time building fun new features.
To say thanks, cycle.travel supporters get these extra features:
And in the mobile app, you’ll also get:
You can sign up to our supporter scheme at Patreon.
Or in the app, click the ‘❤️ Support’ button in the bottom left.
Made in the Cotswolds. Published by Éditions Système D Ltd.
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