In a recent thread in the help forum Jan1of1 mentioned difficulty in planning a route from Pine River to Little Falls in Minnesota.

I have created a screen recording (about six minutes) that I hope will help to show how a Cycle.Travel route can be modified using click-and-drag. Sorry not to have posted this sooner, as I have been on the road. This was done on a Toshiba laptop with a mouse, Windows 10, starting and stopping recording by Win-Alt-R. Reg Pither YouTube channel:

https://youtu.be/u3WF034eVrw

I had already placed markers at the possible start and stop locations: (1) the Paul Bunyan rail-trail by Barclay Avenue in Pine River, and (2) the junction of 1st Street and 1st Avenue in Little Falls. At 00:59 I then let Cycle.Travel plan the route between those two points.

Zooming in, you can see that the suggested route follows the rail-trail (route 45A) as intended, but deviates at Brainerd when crossing route 45. I’ll come back to why that happens.

At 01:44 I make the first click-and-drag movement to try to force it onto route 45. Clicking on the planned route creates a numbered via point, which can then be dragged to the new location. Cycle.Travel then re-plans the route to incorporate that change.

It is necessary to click-and-drag 14 times to force it to route 45, as Cycle.Travel repeatedly strives to find a quiet route.

Lastly, (04:38) I click the ‘mountain’ icon to show the elevation profile, and (04:59) save the route. 104 kilometres or 65 miles.

This is an unusual amount of effort, but it is important to understand why.

For 11 miles, from 60th Avenue to 23rd Street, route 45 runs along Minnesota Highway 371, and you would be cycling on the paved shoulder of a 60 mph four-lane highway – in UK parlance, that is the hard shoulder of a dual carriageway. This is a busy road (30,000 vehicles per day) that Cycle.Travel will try to avoid. At 05:16 in the video I click on one of the via points and go to StreetView so you can see the actual situation.

I read that the Minnesota Department of Transportation gives this advice:

“Bicyclists on all road shoulders must be experienced, capable of sharing the road with cars and trucks. They must also bicycle defensively due to the traffic speeds, volumes and lack of separation from motorized traffic.”

https://dot.state.mn.us/bike/mrt-about.html

Although route 45 is designated as a cycling route by the United States Bicycle Route System (USBRS), I hope you can see why Cycle.Travel tries to take you away from Highway 371.

In general terms, I find the Cycle.Travel click-and-drag feature to be really useful. Often I plan a route and just want to try exploring a different road or lane.

Hope that helps.