RouteCycle has several modes. You can use them together. Here is what each one does.
Circle vs. One way
One way is the classic A-to-B route, like other apps. You pick a start and a finish, and you get a route between them. The difference: RouteCycle tries hard to avoid traffic, so it often does not pick the shortest route. It will choose small, quiet roads instead, even if the ride is longer.
Circle builds a loop that starts and ends at the same place. You only pick a start point and a distance — there is no "finish." This is the mode most people use: leave home, ride 60 km on quiet roads, come back. Building loops by hand is hard in other tools. Here it is the default.
The default ride (no toggles)
If you just build a route without turning any toggles on, you should get a good, peaceful ride — nothing fancy, but solid roads where local cyclists probably ride every day. For most people, this is already enough.
If this default mode works badly for you (sends you on bad roads or highways), then something is wrong in your area — most likely the OpenStreetMap data is incomplete or tagged incorrectly. Please contact us by email or Instagram. I would be glad to look into it and fix it.
Outside the city vs. In the city
Outside the city tries to leave the city and the traffic as fast as possible. If you start in a town, the route will go to the countryside and stay there. You should get a peaceful ride without many cities or traffic, but still with some attractions along the way.
In the city does the opposite. The peacefulness of the route becomes much less important, and finding sights becomes the main goal. Use this when you visit a new city as a tourist and want a ride that shows you the best places. The route can go through busy streets if the interesting places are there.
Sights, springs, cafes
Find attractions changes the route itself so it passes interesting places: castles, viewpoints, monuments, churches, parks, and so on. Right now you can't pick which categories of attractions to look for — we find everything at once. The option to choose specific categories will come in the next release.
Find springs and Find cafes work differently. They do not change the route itself. They just show drinking water points and cafes that are close to the route you already have, so you can pick the ones you want to stop at on the way. We don't show every single one — they are spaced at least 5 km apart and have to be near the route. The idea is to give you a useful, short list, not flood the map with pins.
Stops (waypoints)
You can add up to five stops you want to visit. Stops work the same way in every mode — RouteCycle will try to add these points to the route and pick the quietest roads between each pair of stops. A common use: pick two cafes and a viewpoint, and let RouteCycle choose the roads between them.
One thing to know: sometimes the route will go to a stop and come back the same way, instead of passing through it and continuing on different roads. This happens from time to time today. I plan to improve it in a future release.
Explore new roads
Connect your Strava account. Explore new roads works the same way in every mode — on top of the normal routing, RouteCycle tries to add new (for you) pleasant roads. The route panel shows how many new kilometers each route has. This is the feature most people come back for, once they have ridden their local loops many times.
One honest caveat: today the feature can sometimes send you onto a road you skipped for a reason — a noisy highway, for example. It doesn't happen very often, but it does happen. I plan to improve this, and possibly let you pick how "adventurous" you want the new roads to be, so you can stay on the safer side if you prefer.
There is also an expected case: if you have already ridden every pleasant road in your area, the only "new" roads left will be the less pleasant ones — busy roads, 4–5 lane highways, and so on. RouteCycle has nothing else to suggest, so it suggests those. In the future I want to at least warn you when this happens, so you know that the route is rough because there is nothing pleasant left for you to discover here, not because something is broken.
