There are many different sites for planning bike routes and transferring them to your bike GPS or phone, with Strava, Komoot and Ride With GPS being among the most popular. For those living in Belgium and who hate technology, the old school way to do it is to use the system of ‘Knooppunten’ and navigate between nodes on the map, usually using a guide book with the numbers. You be you.
I use Ride With GPS for planning anything from a short ride across town to a four-week bike tour and have been very happy with it.
I like how easy it is to use, how many different map views it gives you, the fact that it easily transfers to my Wahoo GPS and that I have easy access on my phone and tablet.
Like any website, they are looking to make money. But for all of what I go into below, you will need to register and have an account with them but you do not need to pay. Your data is your payment. They have a number of ‘premium’ services that they will obviously try to sell you but in my experience, for bike touring, there is absolutely no need for them providing you use a few easy workarounds that I list below.
Below, I will explain how you can plan a day ride with it, but it is equally applicable to planning longer tours.
Let me start with the first way that you can avoid having to use the Premium service: plan all your routes on a laptop/ proper computer rather than on your smartphone or tablet. This service is free whereas the option to plan on the latter is part of the Premium service. It is also easier as you will have a bigger screen and can use a mouse and keyboard.
Deciding where you want to go: copying someone else’s route
Supposing that you want to do a day ride starting at your home but don’t know any routes. One good option would be to copy someone else’s ride. (Users can decide whether their routes are public or not.)
Click on ‘Explore’ at the top left of the screen.
For the purposes of privacy, I have pretended that I live in the centre of Bruges, Belgium. This is what I get:
That is a lot of routes, so let me refine down a bit by clicking on the filter button at the top of the white panel on the left side. You can choose how close to home the route must start, how long it should be – minimum and maximum – and the maximum and minimum climbing or elevation. You can also filter by surface, route type (loop, out and back or point to point (A to B) as well as other criteria. By doing this, I can quickly reduce my options to something more bearable. In this case, 19… Much more manageable.
You can then ‘hover’ over the different routes with your mouse and see how they look and if any seem interesting, click on them.
So let’s take a look at this one:
If it looks interesting, you can click on ‘View Full Route’.
One of the great things about Ride With GPS, is that you can look at routes through a variety of map settings by clicking on the map settings in the top right hand corner of the map.
The ones I use most often are Google Maps and OSM Cycle, alternating between them. OSM (Open Street Map) shows established bike routes. This can be great for instance if you want to follow Eurovelo routes and can give reassurance that you are on an established trail.
So in this case, what I see is this, which is nice, but rather overwhelming. The numbers are all the Knooppunten. What I see is that the rider is not always following the established network.
What I can also see in the height profile at the bottom is whether the route features any unpaved sections. I see that it is 98% paved but has a small section just after 21km in the centre of Blankenberge.
Supposing that I am on a road bike and want to check whether it is passable or a mud track. I would then switch to Google Maps view.
I might send my friend Pegman – the little yellow guy in Google Maps – down to take a look. It looks pretty good:
If I am then happy with the route, I can then decide to either save the route directly or edit it a bit to tailor it to my needs / home address.
Planning your own route
Planning your own route in Ride With GPS is very easy.
Once you have an idea of roughly where you want to go – say following a bike path or heading out to a nearby town or landmark – go to the Route Planner screen and select a starting point: possibly your own home or somewhere you have agreed to meet friends.
Sticking with the Bruges example, I remember from when I lived there as a student that a popular outing was the town of Sluis just across the Dutch border. So I either find Sluis on the map or enter it as a destination. Ride With GPS will generate a route.
Then I might add the town of Maldegem as a second destination, clicking on it and then route myself back to Bruges.
So I have a basic route. Now to tinker with it to get it just right. At this point, I might use the OSM Cycle view to see whether it takes me along dedicated bike routes.
A little bit though hard to see. How about adjusting it to ensure that I follow some Knooppunten?
At this point, I switch from ‘Add to route’ to ‘Control point’ in the edit panel on the right side of the screen.
And you can start ‘pulling’ your route around from the one first generated by Ride With GPS, for instance as below where I made sure that it followed a dedicated bike route, or perhaps making sure that it passes a castle or viewpoint.
This can be quite a fiddly process and sometimes Ride With GPS doesn’t want to cooperate, either because it thinks that it is a one-way system or not for bikes or whatever. If you see a route that you are sure you want to be in and it is not cooperating, you can try switching the routing mode above to walking, car or even ‘draw line’.
When you are happy, you can save your route. You can always come back and edit it later. A nice feature is that you can save it as a different version under a new name, so for instance, you could have a shorter less interesting route planned just in case it starts raining or you are not feeling great on the bike.
When saving, you can decide what level of privacy to give it. I generally make it private but for this one, I saved it as public so you can find it. It looks quite nice!
A final check: heatmaps
Ride With GPS like a lot of routing websites has what are called ‘heatmaps’: maps showing where other riders have been on their recorded rides.
You don’t need to do this, but if you have a doubt, it can reassure you that the route is used by other cyclists. The thicker the line, the more people have recorded rides, so a thick red line is likely to be good. If you see no lines or a very thin line, it might be an indication that the road is not suitable.
On the laptop version, this feature qualifies as Premium. But luckily there is a workaround. If you go onto the smartphone or tablet version, you can see them. To access this, either save your route or check an existing route and then move the map to the area where you are intending to ride and press on the ‘layers’ icon in the bottom left corner and then select ‘global heat maps’.
Apparently riding around Bruges is quite popular! By zooming in with your fingers, you can ‘peer’ underneath your route to check that it has a lot of heat.
A quick caveat about heatmaps and bike routes in general: this doesn’t necessarily mean that the route is suitable for your type of bike: there are different types of riders including road racers who are happy to ride along the side of a main road and mountain bikers who live for ditches and muddy tracks. I learnt this the hard way on a trip to the Portuguese coast, routing along what looked like a perfect coastal route and checking that others had ridden, only to discover that it was for mountain bikers. Inadvertently I added to the problem by adding my own ‘bit of heat’ to the map.
Syncing your routes and rides
If you are using the app on your smartphone, you are pretty much limited to looking at the map. If you have a bike GPS however, you can link it with your Ride With GPS account and download turn by turn instructions. You can find instructions on how to do this with the other instructions included with the GPS.
I hope that that is clear, but happy to answer any questions or edit the page.
In the pages below, I have set out other advice for getting going again:
- A general guide on what you need;
- Some tips to get you riding again;
- Advice on what to wear for each season
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