How SpokePlan picks cycling routes worth riding

Updated 2026-05-17

There’s no universally correct road for a bicycle. The right route depends on the bike, the rider, and the kind of ride you want to do. I built SpokePlan because I wanted a planner that understands this natively.

Most navigation tools treat a route as a math problem about distance and time. SpokePlan treats it as an exchange rate between speed and comfort. It scores every road segment for surface roughness, traffic stress, noise, safer turns, and hill shape. The Road or Gravel preset and your typical flat speed adjust those scores to fit your ride.

The problem with driving-first maps

Google Maps is a tool for two billion people. The vast majority of those people are driving cars. When you switch to the bicycle icon, the underlying engine remains focused on what a car needs.

A driving-first graph ignores road surfaces. Fresh tarmac and unbroken cobblestones cost the same to a car. The engine prefers main roads. A painted bike lane on a busy four-lane road often wins over a quiet parallel street one block away because the arterial road is more prominent in the driving data.

Elevation gets flattened out in simple distance equations. A short 20% wall and a long 3% drag might have the same total climb, but they demand entirely different efforts on a bike. A generic router often fails to penalise the steep pitch appropriately.

The limits of existing cycling planners

Dedicated cycling planners like Komoot, Strava, and Ride with GPS are much better than driving apps. They do sometimes rely heavily on popularity heatmaps or push you toward pre-built routes added by other users.

A heatmap shows where people ride. It doesn’t tell you why they rode there. A busy road might be popular simply because it seems like the only available way out of town. Other apps often encourage you to search through libraries of pre-built routes to find a path that fits your ride. This can be a clunky and frustrating process when you just want to go from A to B.

SpokePlan doesn’t ask you to piece together someone else’s ride. You just select your exact start and finish points, and it calculates a route tailored for you. It uses a physics-based model instead of relying purely on popularity. This allows it to discover quiet, hidden alternatives that never show up on a heatmap. Since I started using it, I ride a new route almost every time I go out, and I’m confident the suggested path is actually rideable.

The factors SpokePlan actually weighs

The router behind SpokePlan looks at OpenStreetMap data and calculates a cost for every possible turn and segment. It brings several specific factors into the model.

Surfaces matched to your bike

SpokePlan reads the surface type, smoothness, and track grade logged by volunteers. The Road and Gravel presets shift the tyre profile the router models, narrower for Road and wider for Gravel. A road bike pays a heavy penalty for a cobbled street or a gravel track. A gravel bike absorbs that roughness. The router is more willing to send the gravel bike down that track to avoid a busy road. Turn on the Road feel toggle and every segment of the route is shaded by surface quality, right on the line.

Traffic stress and noise

Traffic stress depends on multiple variables. SpokePlan looks at the number of lanes, the presence of physical separation, and the rank of the road. A protected cycleway gets a massive discount. A painted lane on a 50 km/h road gets very little. The router also factors in noise, actively looking for quieter alternatives like paths through parks or forests.

Safer turns and crossings

Crossing a four-lane road without a traffic light is stressful. Turning left across oncoming traffic carries risk. SpokePlan penalises these movements. A route that looks two minutes faster stops being faster the moment you have to wait for a gap in heavy traffic.

Hill shape and your effort

SpokePlan asks for your typical flat speed and your total mass on the bike (rider, bike, and gear). It uses physics to convert that into the time and effort each climb actually costs you. A steep wall costs more per metre than a long drag, because on a bike it does.

Map what you ride

The map underneath SpokePlan is OpenStreetMap. It’s maintained by surveyors, hikers, and cyclists who notice details that cars miss.

If you ride a path and the map is wrong, you can fix it. OpenStreetMap’s in-browser iD editor opens with a tutorial for first-time contributors. On the phone, the volunteer-built StreetComplete app contributes back to OSM by asking simple yes/no questions about surface types and cycleways while you’re out riding.

A road you tag as smooth becomes a road SpokePlan prefers. A path you mark as restricted stops routing cyclists into trouble. The map gets better for the next rider.

Try it

Click two spots on the map. SpokePlan plans the route. Preferences are there if you want to switch bike type or change your typical flat speed. Got the route? Share the link with friends (anyone can open it, no account needed) or here’s how to import the GPX file into your head unit or another app.