Plan a gravel route on quiet roads

Updated 2026-05-25

A good gravel ride isn’t the shortest line between two points. It’s the one that stays off the busy roads, takes the farm track when there is one, and doesn’t mind a bit of rough surface to get there. SpokePlan’s Gravel preset is tuned for exactly that.

What the Gravel preset changes

Switch the preset to Gravel and two things shift in how every road segment is scored.

• It favours quiet roads. Busy roads cost more under Gravel than under Road, so given a direct main-road route or a slightly longer one on quiet lanes and tracks, Gravel tends to take the quiet option.
• It tolerates rough surface. A compacted farm track or a fine-gravel forest path is comfortable on wide gravel tyres, so Gravel treats those surfaces as ordinary going instead of penalising them the way the Road preset does.

Together they push the route off the paved arterials and onto the kind of roads a gravel bike is built for. You set your typical flat speed and total weight on the bike. The rest comes with the preset.

Reading the surface colours

Turn on the Road feel toggle and every segment is shaded by surface quality. The colours adapt to your bike: on gravel tyres, surfaces like compacted gravel and fine gravel come up green, the same as smooth tarmac, because on wide tyres they really are easy going. The same stretch shades a step or two rougher under the Road preset.

As a rule of thumb, green and yellow are go, orange is rideable but rough, and red or dark red are the stretches to design around. A short red section is often fine. A long one is worth a detour. Use the colours to spot the rough bit on an otherwise smooth route, or to confirm a shortcut is rideable before you commit.

Gravel finds the quiet back roads

Plan the same two points on Road, then switch to Gravel, and the line often moves. Where Road stays on the paved through-road, Gravel slips onto the quiet parallel: a service road, a field track, a path through the woods. Sometimes the gravel option is even shorter, because the quiet route was there all along and only the surface was holding a road bike back.

Try it

Pick Gravel, click two spots on the map, and see what quiet roads it turns up. For how SpokePlan weighs surface, traffic, and hills on every route, here’s how it picks cycling routes. Planned one to ride with friends? Share it by link, no account needed to open it.