BikeRoll Website
The most memorable bike trips are always preceded with thorough and careful planning. Obviously, any ad-hoc ride can be very enjoyable but a well-planned trip can lead to the best rides where you do not spend most of the time finding your way and then missing the best bits. And weekends are very precious.
In this post, I would like to present an alternative to all the other route apps that are available to plan your next cycling trip:
Plan your route with BikeRoll
This planning tool can help you to plan tour bike routes. It does not provide a rocket science solution. Rather it has one job and one job only, i.e., make bike route planning easy and simple.
Why use BikeRoll? The main goal of BikeRoll is to make bike route planning as simple as possible. It has a clean and intuitive user interface with no unnecessary buttons and never used features. Nevertheless is it free, there are no premium plans (not even user registration), every feature is available to everybody.
The most distinctive feature of BikeRoll is its color-coded elevation profile. The disadvantage of ordinary altitude maps is that they do not give you enough information about the real difficulty of a particular ascent. The hardness of any slope depends on the length of the route and it is just too much processing for the human brain to figure out the power and stamina needed. Just by taking a quick look on the BikeRoll’s elevation profile, one can have a pretty accurate overview (based on the colours) about the difficulty of the route, e.g., blue is easy, yellow is a bit harder, and red is getting tough. It requires a bit of practising (biking the planned routes) but trust me, it is worth the time.
A non-distinctive, yet very useful, the feature is that the planned routes can be saved and accessed later. What makes BikeRoll unique is that all the saved routes can be listed and accessed easily and fast. Even though BikeRoll has no user registration, a Facebook or Google login is required to authenticate the author of the routes.
When biking any route, especially in the forest, it is easy to get lost. BikeRoll offers real-time tracking directly in the browser on your smartphone. No app install is needed, your actual position is always updated on the map and you can see instantly if you are off the track.
Note that BikeRoll will not record the track its goal is just to keep you on the road. The planned route can be downloaded in GPX format so its data can be used on a smartwatch tracker.
Every bike trip can be ruined by bad weather. We all know how extreme heat, cold, or rain can result in painful cycling. To prevent such unpleasant events, an instant five-day weather forecast is always displayed in the area where the route is planned. Even if such a rough (daily) weather report may not be sufficient, it gives you a general overview that can be very helpful.
BikeRoll is available in multiple languages. The importance of this feature may not be appreciated by native English speaker but for anyone who does not speak English, this can make the difference. At this point, it supports eleven languages and new ones are always added when volunteers are found to do the translations.
Note that this post is not meant to be a thorough presentation of BikeRoll, it rather gives you at a glance why you should give it a try. For a more detailed tutorial please visit:
Plan your route with BikeRoll
BikeRoll Website
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