The Ultimate UK Cycle Route Planner

With almost all the UK's cycle routes on one double-sided map, The Ultimate UK Cycle Route Planner is a really useful companion to online map systems for longer rides.

Online route-planning sites are great, but sometimes you need a bigger view than they provide. The Ultimate UK Cycle Route Planner gives you that wide-angle view. The Route Planner gathers all the UK's designated cycling routes into one map, from the Sustrans National Cycle Network to less-publicised routes like Swans Way in Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. The only significant network I can think of that's missing is the National Byway, perhaps because its routing on minor roads doesn't fit the Route Planner's traffic-free emphasis.

Unlike a lot of online maps, railway lines and stations are clearly shown here so you can plan train-assisted rides too. Canalside paths are also marked in three degrees of usability: no cycling, NCN cycle route and possibly cycleable.

I do like that 'possibly'. For me, the most memorable rides involve an element of exploration. That can be just riding a new route, but it's exciting to head down a road and not be sure it's actually passable.

If you like a little bit more certainty, you might find the UK Cycle Route Planner is over-reliant on the Sustrans National Cycle Network. Even Sustrans itself has admitted some of the network isn't fit for purpose, and while some of the worst sections have been removed from the official network there's still a high degree of uncertainty when it comes to just what sort of surface quality you should expect. Some of the tracks marked on here are barely passable by mountain bike. For example, there's a section of the Icknield Way south-west of Thetford – marked here among 'cyclable national trails & signed mountain bike routes' – that was six inches deep in sand when I tried to ride it a few years ago.

On the other hand, one of my local trails, Worsted Street Roman Road, is marked as a mountain bike track when it's quite doable on a hybrid or a road bike with 28mm tyres, especially in dry weather.

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Relying on the Sustrans network brings another problem – that it ignores enormous numbers of great minor roads. The UK's best cycling is on minor roads, because the vast majority of them have proper hard surfaces (albeit battered ones after 13 years of Tory neglect) but very little traffic as drivers stick to A and B roads.

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The Planner does have some roads marked as 'suggested minor road links' and this is something I'd like to see a lot more of, though I suspect marking all of them would make many areas almost into solid masses of purple. Maybe Excellent Books can set up a method of people submitting approved routes, or use heatmaps from Garmin or Strava that in my experience tend to do a good job of steering away from the busiest roads.

It could be I'm asking for serious scope creep here. The UK Cycle Route Planner focuses on traffic-free routes and does about as good a job as it's possible to do of collecting them all on one map.

Conclusions

I don't think more route information could be crammed into a single map without it having to be unfeasibly large. If your cycling life involves planning longer rides, this map could be a big help.

Who should buy the UK Cycle Route Planner?

If you want to plan longer routes than is easily feasible on a typical online map tool, this is for you.

Verdict

Information-dense map with a vast network of UK traffic-free or low-traffic routes