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:

Google Street View. Most paved roads in Europe and North America are covered. Clicking this opens Google Street View in a new window.
Mapillary. This is an independent alternative to Google Street View with better coverage of Germany and Austria: we show this by default in those countries. Once the Mapillary window has opened, you’ll need to click a green coverage dot on their map (bottom left corner) to see images. Mapillary also has good coverage of some cycle routes; we don’t currently show the option by default outside Germany and Austria, but you can see the option by holding down Control (Command on a Mac) when you click the route.
See photos. We also show photos taken by cycle.travel app users, and in the UK and Ireland, pictures from geograph.org.uk.

Route tools

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

When you click a via point on your journey, you’ll see a More… button in the bottom right. This offers access to additional tools:

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. Click More then choose ‘Delete before’ or ‘Delete after’.
You can tell cycle.travel whether or not it may perform a U-turn at a via point.

PDFs

cycle.travel supporters can download a colour map PDF of the journey.

First save the journey, then click the PDF button. You’ll be asked to choose a scale – City scale is the largest scale (most close-up), Local and Touring are in between, and Long-distance is the smallest scale (most zoomed out). The PDF typically takes a few seconds to generate.

Turn-by-turn directions

For each journey, detailed turn-by-turn instructions appear in the left-hand panel. You can have a compact printed form of these, called a ‘cue sheet’. Save the journey and click PDF as above, but then choose Cue-sheet (instructions only).

Your preferences

Creating an account on cycle.travel lets you customise your map preferences. Log in, go to My bike then Profile. Here you can choose miles or kilometres, your average speed and number of miles per day, and whether clicking on the map always adds new via points.

You can also set your home country, which helps cycle.travel guess whether you mean France or Texas when you type ‘Paris’; and your home location, which is used to centre the map when you first view it.