Plan a round trip

In Bikerouter, you can plan a round trip starting from a chosen starting point.

Two parameters are required for the planning:

1. the maximum distance of the route from the starting point (radius) 2. the compass direction in which the route should be planned—relative to the starting point

Bikerouter will then plan a route using the currently selected routing profile (and, if applicable, a selected route alternative).

After setting a starting point (enable drawing mode with the pencil icon and click on the map), start the round-trip planner by clicking the icon (no. 2 in the image below).

Tip

You can also open the planner with the keyboard shortcut Shift+R.

A dialog window for the round-trip planner opens:

Here you set the two required parameters:

The radius can be set in steps between one and one hundred kilometers, with a step size of one kilometer.

There are various presets for the radius that you can apply with a single click.

The direction is specified in degrees and can be set directly on the compass. The step size here is 15 degrees.

You can set the direction by dragging the direction arrow (press and hold, then move) or by simply clicking the desired direction.

After clicking the “Plan round trip” button, the route is calculated and displayed directly on the map.

The helper points used in the calculation are inserted as waypoints and can subsequently be edited as usual by dragging. So you get a full-fledged route that supports all Bikerouter features.

Radius and route length

Why do you set the radius instead of directly selecting the desired route length?

The route length only emerges from the computed route and can vary greatly for the same radius. This depends on many factors (routing profile, obstacles along the way, structure of the way network, etc.).

If you tried to plan for a fixed route length, you'd have to compute many route variants, which can take a long time and consume a lot of ressources. Therefore, calculating based on a specified distance from the starting point is more efficient.

However, you can roughly estimate the route length if the radius is known and there are no major obstacles for the route planning (for example, a sea like the Baltic Sea or regions without suitable paths).

Radius	Route length
5 km	25 km - 35 km
10 km	55 km - 65 km
15 km	75 km - 90 km
20 km	100 km - 125 km

For reference, there is an indicator that shows the estimated route length. The actual value may vary at any time.