Creating your own route is simple at its core: just click on the map, and you’re done. Things get interesting when you tell the route planner how a section should be ridden—because that’s exactly what sets an enduro route apart from a car route.
Here’s how the planner works, what the riding modes actually do, what you see after the calculations, and where things still get stuck today.
Setting Waypoints
Click on the map, and a waypoint appears. The first one doesn’t ask for anything. Starting with the second one, a small dialog box appears: How should the section up to this point be ridden? The default is whatever you’ve set as the standard in your account settings.
Next to the map is the list. There, you can:
- reorder — drag and drop
- rename — the field shows the coordinates as a placeholder, but the placeholder isn’t saved. A point without a name stays nameless; you won’t have to carry around “47.1234, 11.4567"
- delete — the ✕ in the row
- change the driving mode — the row of icons in the row
Clicking on a marker on the map selects it; it does not delete it. Deletion only occurs in the list, where it’s unambiguous.
Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y work. And that goes for everything: moving, deleting, reordering, renaming, and changing the route type. While you’re typing in a text field, these functions are disabled.
There’s also a location search above the map. Whatever you select there becomes a waypoint in the planner right away.
Destination or Guide Point
Every waypoint is one of these two. A destination is a place you actually want to go—the cabin, the gas station. A guide point simply draws the line where you want it to go, even if there’s nothing there.
The difference becomes apparent during export: Destinations appear as waypoints in the GPX file, while shape points do not. So your GPS will show you the locations you intended, rather than the twenty bends you used to draw the line along the correct ridge.
The dialog box when setting a waypoint intentionally doesn’t ask this. When you set a point, you usually don’t even know yet whether it will be a stop or just a turn.
Riding Style: Five Options per Section
This is the heart of it all. The riding style belongs to the section that starts at this waypoint—not the one before it. That’s why it moves along with its waypoint when you reorder the sections.
Off-road — your own enduro profile. Takes forest and field trails, tracks—anything that’s rideable. The standard.
Highway allowed — road, fastest route, including the highway. For the approach, when 300 kilometers separate you from the terrain.
Road, fast — the same, but without the highway. For anyone who isn’t allowed to or doesn’t want to drive on the highway.
Road, winding — seeks out the small roads. Based on four Alpine routes, this roughly doubles the number of curves per kilometer, and the proportion of major roads drops significantly: from 87 percent to 7 percent. The route usually becomes shorter, not longer—it takes you off the expressway, not on a detour. The trade-off is passing through towns.
As the crow flies — a straight line, without a route. For places that OpenStreetMap simply doesn’t know about: a ford, a stretch of beach, a factory grounds, a ferry without a mapped route. Until then, such a section simply fails and leaves a gap in the route.
The point is that the driving style depends on the specific section, not the entire route. The approach may be on a highway, but the stage that follows must never be. A route-wide setting can’t handle that.
What the router should avoid
Below the name field is a drop-down box with switches: Avoid toll roads, Avoid ferries, Wet conditions, Include narrow paths, Avoid unpaved roads.
Which ones you see depends on the profiles included in your route. A toggle that would have no effect on the active profile isn’t displayed at all. A toggle that pretends to do something is worse than none at all.
Two of them require an explanation:
“Include narrow paths” is turned off, and that’s by design. Many paths and footpaths are closed to motor vehicles. Using them is a decision you make—not one that a default setting decides for you.
“Wet Conditions” tells the profile that clay is a bad idea right now. It then switches to firmer ground.
The highway is deliberately not listed here, but rather in the riding modes—because a tour-wide setting couldn’t disable it for a single stage.
After Calculation
The sections are calculated in parallel, up to four at a time. “Route calculated” then appears below the map, and the data bar fills in: length, ascent, descent, travel time, steepest climb, and percentage of unpaved terrain.
What is unknown remains blank—it never shows as zero. A number that no one knows is omitted rather than invented.
The line is colored according to the surface type, and below it, if necessary, there is a wider dashed border in purple and blue: access restrictions apply here. Agricultural and forestry traffic, residents permitted, permit required. On a measured 66-kilometer Alpine crossing, this accounted for 29 percent of the route. That’s why we don’t block anything—there are good reasons to ride there, such as if you’re heading to the cabin—but you should be aware of it.
The Elevation Profile
Below the map, in the same box. If you hover your mouse over it, a dot moves along the route—and vice versa.
The bars are colored according to gradient, on a continuous scale. Important to know: the gradient is averaged over 50 meters, not from point to point. On a real route, the points are sometimes 84 centimeters apart, and then half a meter of measurement noise turns that into a 60 percent gradient. Over 50 meters, realistic values are produced, and you’ll still see a 40-meter ramp with a 30 percent gradient.
If you zoom in on the map, the profile follows. The elevation axis scales accordingly—over 300 kilometers, the relief is a straight line; over 3 kilometers on the screen, it takes on a shape. The kilometer values remain absolute so you know exactly where you are on the route.
If a section doesn’t work
A broken section doesn’t ruin the entire tour. The other sections are still calculated, and the gap is drawn as a dashed red line—because a solid line would imply a connection that no one has calculated.
Below the map, you’ll see:
A segment is missing—the route cannot be saved.
Saving is disabled until the gap is fixed. Move the waypoint a little or set the segment to a different route type.
One special case occurs more often than you might think: you set a road segment to a cabin at the end of a forest road. For the road profile, it’s simply inaccessible. Instead of giving up, the planner splits the segment: road as far as the network extends, the rest off-road. And it tells you so:
A section had to be driven partially off-road.
Because you wanted a road but didn’t get one the entire way.
Saving and What Comes Next
The following are saved: name, description, keywords, the waypoints with their driving modes, and the calculated route. Afterward, you can:
- export as GPX — including all your points within a one-kilometer radius
- create a reverse route — this creates a second route; the original remains. And it’s recalculated rather than mirrored, because one-way streets and no-turn signs make the return trip a different route. Uphill and downhill sections are naturally swapped in the process.
- duplicate — as a starting point for a variation
- Reopen and continue building — the planner reloads waypoints and the route line
Little things that make everyday life more enjoyable
- Bookmark starting point. The button on the map saves the current section as the starting view. An empty planner will then open for you instead of in Tyrol.
- Default route type and default filters are found in your account settings. These apply to new plans—a saved tour is never silently changed when opened.
- The map layer is remembered. Topographic is the default because a street map shows neither contour lines nor the type of path. Satellite and Street are also available.
- Passes and your own waypoints are separate layers and can be turned off individually.
- Renaming does not trigger a recalculation. The planner remembers what defines the route—coordinates, riding modes, filters—and a name isn’t one of them.
What’s available today
- Waypoints via click, location search, or by dragging a GPX file onto the map
- Five riding modes, individually set for each section
- Filters that only appear when they actually have an effect
- Elevation profile with gradient colors, linked to the map
- Terrain and access restrictions shown as colors on the line
- Information bar displaying distance, elevation gain, travel time, and steepest slope
- Reorder by dragging; undo all edits
- Save, export, flip, duplicate
- Three map layers, passes and waypoints layer, full screen, scale, location determination
Where it gets stuck
To put it bluntly:
Long sections take time. 554 kilometers in one go takes the router about 25 seconds. The same route with a waypoint in the middle: about 10 seconds. Adding a waypoint is the fastest thing you can do when planning—and the second time around, it’s quick anyway, because calculated segments are cached. The 25 seconds then turn into a fraction of that.
Every time you move something, all segments are recalculated. What’s already been calculated comes from the cache, but you’ll notice this when planning a new long route.
A straight-line route makes the elevation data for the entire trip unknown. Its length is factored in, but no one knows anything about the terrain below—and so we claim there’s no elevation gain for the entire trip. That’s the trade-off of this routing method, and we’d rather be upfront about it than make up a number.
There are no alternative routes, and that’s how it will stay. Three suggestions side by side are for a GPS device. Here, you’re the one planning, and if the route doesn’t suit you, you have a reason—a shifted waypoint explains that more precisely than a number between 0 and 3.
You can’t mark restricted areas yet. An area that the route bypasses is planned but not yet built.
The location search can be slow. It runs through a third-party service with one request per second—for all visitors combined. If multiple users are using it at the same time, the system will put you on hold rather than reject your request.
When zoomed out far, you won’t see all the mountain passes. There are easily several hundred across the Alps. The map then shows the highest ones and tells you that it has omitted some.
And the most important caveat isn’t our fault: OpenStreetMap doesn’t know where you’re allowed to drive. Many roads are closed to motor vehicles without that information being recorded. The purple borders show you where the information is—they don’t show you where it’s missing. It’s up to you to keep an eye on signs and local rules.
What you can do
- For long trips, set a waypoint halfway through. This is more likely to cut the calculation time in half than to double it.
- Break the route down into realistic sections. Set the approach to “Highway allowed” and the main leg to “Off-road”—that way, the travel time and terrain ratings will be accurate.
- Check the purple borders before you set off. A 29 percent section of an Alpine crossing with restrictions is not an exception.
- Choose “Road, winding” for the return trip. Shorter than the expressway and with significantly more curves—that’s the best deal in the whole planner.
- Save your starting point. Pressing a button once saves you from having to enter it manually for every new trip.