What Routeloop is, what it is not, and what happens to your rides. If something is missing, ask—the list grows from what people actually want to know.
Nope. I built it for riding and it shows in the vocabulary, but a route is a route and I enjoy car road trips as well. A long trip with a lot of stops is the same problem on two wheels or four—where you’re sleeping, how far you can go before fuel, which road is actually worth taking.
The router is in car mode regardless. Google’s motorcycle routing only works in a handful of Asian markets, so every route Routeloop builds is already computed for four wheels.
Because it isn’t following your line—it’s re-routing between your stops. Give a navigation app two points a long way apart and it picks its own way between them, usually the fast way and rarely the good one. Miss a turn and it can throw out the rest of the route.
The fix is to leave it no room. Put enough intermediate points along the route and there’s never a stretch long enough for the app to form an opinion. Doing that by hand is miserable, which is why Routeloop does it for you.
Google My Maps caps at about ten waypoints and one route per layer, and you can’t navigate from a custom map. Google Maps proper will reroute you onto whatever it considers efficient, which is rarely the road you wanted.
Routeloop gives you 200 stops a route across 31 routes, no layers to fight, and no opinion about the road you take. Whatever you plan is visible on one map at once, all of it, however far it runs.
Most of them are navigation apps with a planner bolted on, and the planning is usually fine. Where they fall down is the hand-off—the moment you dump a GPX into your device and it does something else entirely.
That’s the part Routeloop is built around. Beyond it: stop counts in the hundreds rather than the low teens, the whole ride on one map instead of one stretch at a time, and share links that open for someone with no account.
In my experience, motorcycle touring brings with it all the spontaneity you’ll ever need in the form of weather, flat tires, broken parts, and random road closures. Trust me—plan the shit out of your ride—it’ll be plenty spontaneous anyway.
Up to 31 routes, 200 stops a route, and no cap on distance.
Those are the real numbers, and I’d rather give you them than say “unlimited” and have you find the wall. A month of riding at two hundred stops a route is not a ride anyone takes—the caps exist so one runaway import can’t take the site down, not to ration what you plan.
For comparison: Google My Maps stops you at about ten waypoints.
Three kinds of dot, because they do three different jobs.
Every point you drop is a POI to begin with. Drop pins wherever you are thinking of going, in whatever order, then promote the ones the route actually has to pass through—“Make this a stop” in the row’s ⋮ menu. That is when the road gets drawn. The first point of each route is promoted for you, because a route has to start somewhere.
Changed your mind? “Make this a POI” puts it back. Nothing moves either way, and the point keeps its notes, its categories and its reservation details.
The distinction matters when the plan leaves Routeloop: exports can carry stops and shaping points differently, and getting it wrong is how routes arrive on a GPS looking nothing like what you planned.
Yes. Seventeen roles—fuel, food, coffee, drinks, hotel, camp, grocery, viewpoint, meeting point and the rest—so a route reads at a glance instead of being seventeen identical pins.
They earn their keep on export too: a stop tagged as fuel can be treated differently from a scenic detour by whatever you hand the file to.
It’s a rough measure of how much the road bends, worked out from the shape of your route.
Routeloop walks the line every 25 meters and adds up how far the direction changes. A road that runs dead straight adds nothing. A road that turns constantly adds a lot. Divide by the miles and you get one number, which becomes one of five words: Straight, Mostly straight, Some curves, Twisty or Very twisty. Hover the label to see the number behind it.
It counts bends, not junctions. Turning left at a crossroads onto another straight road barely registers; a mountain pass that never stops curving registers a lot.
A whole route gets averaged, which can be unfair to a good road—forty brilliant miles and two hundred of slab average out to something dull. So the hover also tells you about the best twenty-mile stretch of the route, when that stretch is meaningfully better than the rest of it. That second number is usually the one worth paying attention to.
Because it comes from the shape of the line and nothing else, it works on rides you imported as well as ones you built here.
Yes—KML, KMZ, GPX, GeoJSON and CSV, plus a .zip of any of them. Drop the files onto the import page and each one becomes a route of one ride.
What you get back is an editable ride, not a picture of one. The file is pulled apart into stops and legs you can drag, rename, reorder and add routes to. Most tools import a track as a single frozen line; if that’s all you needed you could have kept the file.
Because the name is doing a job. A file called routeloop_big-sur-run_d02_2026-08-14_lost-coast.gpx says which ride it belongs to, that it’s route 2, when that route starts, and what you called it—so when you drag a folder of them back in, your ride comes back in the right order with its dates intact.
That matters more than it sounds. A GPX or KML file has nowhere inside it to put a date. Your GPS reads those formats, so if you export a planned ride and bring it back, the schedule is the one thing that would otherwise be lost. Putting it in the filename is the only place it survives.
Nothing is required to follow this. Files you named yourself import exactly as they always did, in the order you picked them.
Yes, for any ride with more than one route. Under the download buttons there’s a One file per route (zip) row—pick a format and you get an archive with one correctly named file per route, ready to load onto a GPS one route at a time.
Drop that archive back onto the import page and you get the whole ride back, routes in order and dated.
It runs in a phone browser, and a shared ride reads fine on one. Building a multi-route ride is a big-screen job today.
The maps, search and routing are global, so in principle yes. Testing has been US-centric, so expect rougher edges elsewhere—and tell me when you find them.
Yes, and it already is—every ride starts private and stays that way until you change it.
Four settings, and for three of them the difference is who can find it rather than who can open it:
Friends is the only one of the four that checks who is asking, so it is the only one where sending someone the link is not enough.
It stays yours, and it is not sold, shared or mined. The full account is on the privacy page; the short version:
Your rides and stops are stored so the app can show them to you and to whoever you share a link with. Nothing else reads them. There is no advertising business here to feed them to.
A few outside services see fragments in the course of doing their job, and the privacy page lists all five. Google draws the map, finds the places you search for, and computes the roads between your stops. Google Analytics and Cloudflare count that a page was opened, and which one. Resend carries the link if you sign in by email. None of them gets a copy of your rides.
No. You pick your own name and handle when you sign up, and neither is inherited from Google.
Google does hand over your first and last name when you sign in with it, and those land on your profile where only you can see them. They are not shown to anyone else unless you turn that on yourself.
It is stored so new rides can start from your door without you searching for it every time, and it is shown to nobody but you. Not on shared rides, not on a profile, not to riders you plan with. You can leave it blank; the only thing you lose is that shortcut.
Yes, on the site. Which pages get opened, how long people stay on them, what gets clicked on the way out, and roughly what gets used and what gets ignored—that is how I find out what is working and what is not, and it is the only reason any of it is counted. It is Google Analytics and Cloudflare Web Analytics, and the privacy page says exactly what each one records.
What it is not: it does not follow you to other sites, it is not joined to your Google account, there is no advertising anywhere in it, and nothing about your rides or your profile goes with it. If you would rather not be counted, any content blocker stops it and the site works exactly the same—or use the switch on the privacy page.
No. Not sold, not traded, not shared, not monetized, and not ever—there is no version of this where that changes. There is no advertising here and there will not be, so there is nothing that wants your data and nobody to hand it to.
The usual deal is that when something is free, you are the product. That is what happened to social media, and it is the thing I most want this not to become. The honest price of free here is much smaller: I get to see how the site is used, so I can make it better. That is the whole exchange.
Because Cloudflare says you are somewhere the law asks first—the EU, the EEA, the UK, or Switzerland—or you arrived over Tor, where it cannot tell. There, Google Analytics waits until you say yes. Nobody else sees a prompt, because nobody else’s law asks, and a cookie bar on every visit is the thing everybody hates.
Say no and nothing from Google loads, now or on your next visit; your answer is kept in your own browser and never sent to me. Say yes and it works as it does for everyone else. You can change your mind on the privacy page.
Because Routeloop isn’t ready yet. It’s in a closed alpha, which is developers only. Beta testing is the next step and it’s invite-only—riders I know, a few at a time.
What you can do now is get on the list from the join page.
I hope not, but there’s a nonzero chance. Expect rough edges, missing pieces and the occasional data reset. Anything you’d be upset to lose, export or keep a copy of.
Yes, and there is no paid plan and no advertising. If that ever has to change so the thing can keep running, I’ll say so here before it does.
One person. I’ve been riding for 27 years—hundreds of thousands of miles, all of them across the western US, Canada, and Mexico—and building things for the web for 33 years.
I built this because every planning tool I tried had the same shape: something clever I didn’t need and couldn’t turn off, sitting on top of something basic that didn’t work. Stop times, waypoint counts, import and export that survives contact with a real device. I wanted the tool without the first part and with all of the second, so I’m making it.
Routeloop is an early build of something I’m making. Expect rough edges, missing pieces, and the occasional data reset. Feedback is the whole point.
