Where can I find local bike routes?

Question

Where are the best places to find bike maps with local routes and trails?

Places I typically reference when searching for this includes:

1. Most local bike shops (LBS) have local maps available or for sale.
2. Employees of any LBS are often avid riders and will hold a plethora of knowledge about the local area and trails.
3. Local trail clubs (typically volunteers that help maintain trails in an area) can be a resource to direct you to finding maps or trail information.
4. Your local Chamber of Commerce or Parks & Rec type of department will typically have maps of local bike routes.
5. Google Maps has recently introduced the ability to find directions from one place to another by bike. For certain metro areas they will route you along known bike routes or trails. When doing directions click on the "Bike" icon to tailor it specifically for bikes.

Please feel free to add more.

Answer 1

You can use google maps, and click on the bike to see local bike paths and trails. (Still in beta but very good nonetheless.)

• MapMyRide
• RideTheCity
• Ride with GPS
• Strava (sign-up required)
• Komoot
• bikemap

are some of the more popular routing sites, I'm sure there are more but that should get you started :)

The following sites are now defunct but preserved by the Internet Archive:

• Bikely http://www.bikely.com
• Pedaling.com http://www.pedaling.com
• Bike Route Toaster http://bikeroutetoaster.com/

Answer 2

OpenCycleMap, based on OpenStreetMap, is another resource you might consider. It uses a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, which is why many of the mobile applications actually use the OpenCycleMap data. Anyone can register and contribute to OpenCycleMap, so in that sense it is like Wikipedia, in that it is often more up-to-date. Just looking at OpenCycleMap is much easier than a Google Map for instance, because the cycle routes are clearly marked.
www.skobbler.us is useful as an app on a smart phone. It does not only provide car routes but also for bike and pedestrian. But both are basically maps, not so much suggestions where to ride.

Answer 3

Go to https://connect.garmin.com, and click on the "Explore" link. Type in the region that you're interested in, and you'll see bike routes that others have ridden on. It's a great way to find new routes and there's very detailed GPS data (and elevation profiles!) available for each one of those routes.

Here's an example of routes that I found for my vacation in Seaside, OR earlier this year.

Answer 4

Ride with GPS is my current fave and keeps getting better.

Here are the features:

• Draw routes on a map before you ride, then download to your GPS unit for turn-by-turn directions
• See elevation profile as you draw, so you know how difficult the ride will be before you head out
• No sign-up required, no GPS required

In my area there are a lot of user contributed routes, but may not be the case everywhere.

Answer 5

I can see that nobody has yet mentioned http://www.bikeroutetoaster.com which I use for route creation before I head out on an unknown territory.

Slowdown uphill calculation based on steepness

The best thing about it is that you can set few parameters (defaults are quite fine for advanced recreation) and it calculates timing based on these parameters which turn out to be quite good. You can then upload it to your GPS unit (ie. GARMIN EDGE 500) and use it as your virtual partner.

You can also set track points, so your unit can tell you when and where to turn (you can do that easily on a map because you see roads). I'm using GARMIN EDGE 500 which doesn't have maps so these turns on unknown roads are great. I can focus more on my ride than finding my way on unknown village roads.

The only downside to it is that it doesn't calculate descends. It uses your flat speed for that, because descends are tricky. So you gain a bit over your virtual partner on descends. But if nothing else that's a nice confidence booster for you.

So I use:

1. http://connect.garmin.com for uploading data
2. http://www.ridewithgps.com for better section analysis
3. http://www.bikeroutetoaster.com for great pre-ride routing capabilities

If anyone knows of an alternative to bikeroutetoaster.com I'd be interested to hear about it.

Answer 6

Runkeeper.com can have some routes but the only ones I find for my area is the ones I've added.

http://www.mapmyride.com/ is another good resource. Those are the ones I use.

Answer 7

Some cities also have a Google Maps layer for bike routes. When punching in source and destination address, there will be a little bike icon if it's available. Haven't tried it out, so have no idea how accurate it is, but it might be worth a shot.

Answer 8

Strava.com and mapmyride.com are particularly nice for finding routes. They also categorize the climbs (from #5 to Hors) as documentation for bragging rights. Both have smartphone apps. Mapmyride has a slightly better UI (IMO), but strava has more users/rides (at least in the areas I am interested in).

One interesting thing you can do on strava for giggles is to check out what the pros do on their rides: Like this!

Bikely used to be the best, but they have problems with uptime and lag (the server is in GB).

Answer 9

In Belgium and The Netherlands there exists a "Fietsroutenetwerk" (Bicycle route network). This is great for planning road trips. Short and longer ones.

Alongside save and good cycling roads, there are simple signs with numbers that point to the next node in the network. At nodes, there are signs to connected nodes.

The idea is, that you plan your own route, but you need to know the numbers of the nodes. There are websites and plans that can help you with your planning (Example).

At home you make a list of node's to follow, like (14 - 15 - 16 - 14), and you can simply follow the signs.

Nodes are not connected with the shortest route, but with nice and safe bike routes.

There's over 20.000 km documented, and connected routes.

Answer 10

I'm rather fond of Everytrail. You can find maps for just about any activity, not just biking, though that's what I primarily use it for. There are iPhone and Android apps too, which work really well. They just added the ability to search for trails based on your current location (in the Android version at least), filterable by activity (road biking, mountain biking, etc). I've found a bunch of new places to check out this way.

Answer 11

Transport Direct have a route planner which includes cycling routes and has some nice options (especially the choice between quietest, quickest and most recreational route).

CycleGM have details of all cycle lanes and traffic free routes through Greater Manchester on their website, but the online map is not very user friendly.

Answer 12

I mostly use Wikiloc. You can find routes for different activities, visualize them in Google maps, open them in Google Earth and load them into your GPS.

Answer 13

For waymarked routes, I like to use https://cycling.waymarkedtrails.org:

The routes are based on Openstreetmap, as is the background map. As you zoom in and out, it shows on the right the routes in the field of view sorted by length. By clicking on the route, you can download a GPX to load into your navigational device for offline use. Apart from bicycle touring, waymarkedtrails also supports hiking, mountain-biking, inline-skating, horse riding, and winter sport slopes.

Limitation: unlike opencyclemap, proposed routes are not shown, only final routes (which makes sense, since I would expect proposed routes not to be waymarked).