cycle.travel has five route-planning modes for you to choose from:

• Any: Finds the best all-round route, with low traffic, good scenery and minimising climbs.
• Paved: Finds the best route on paved surfaces only.
• Gravel: Finds a route with more unpaved surfaces, preferring gravel, compacted and other good-quality surfaces where available.
• Routes: Follows signposted cycle routes only. (Europe only including UK)
• Night: Avoids unlit paths through parks, towpaths, industrial estates etc. (UK only)

Can you add more options?

The fast speed of the route-planner means that it isn’t feasible to add lots more options. Basically, the speed comes from precalculating all the best routes. Adding more options means precalculating more routes, which requires more memory, which means more expensive servers.

Although that rules out adding fine-tuning options like “no hills” or “don’t mind traffic” or “very little traffic”, cycle.travel aims to make it easy for you to adjust the route (by dragging) if there are sections you want to avoid. 

You can turn the route-planner off between any two points, by clicking the first of the points and choosing Go direct to the next one. This means you can plan a short stretch on a busy road even if cycle.travel doesn’t recommend it.

(If you want to read up on the maths behind cycle.travel’s super-fast routing algorithm, it’s known as Contraction Hierarchies.)