PitStopper.net Blog - Tips, Stories & Updates for Route Planning

A list of places is not a route. I fed the planner twenty National Trust properties in the order they appear on a list, and it cheerfully drove me past Dover twice. Auto order halves it.

Send a Route to Your Phone

September 9, 2026 6 min read

The worst part of planning a ride on a computer is the bit at the end where you have to get the file onto the thing you are actually taking with you. Send to Phone replaces that with a QR code.

What Counts as a U-turn?

September 9, 2026 8 min read

Technical

Our turn generator kept calling ordinary sharp corners u-turns. Fixing it needed two measurements rather than one, and taught me that the plain u-turn symbol is not a vaguer version of u-turn left. It means something different.

Compare GPX Tracks: Check a Conversion Against the Recording It Came From

September 7, 2026 10 min read

How do you tell whether a track-to-route conversion is any good? In the end by looking at it - but the hard part is knowing where to look. Two lines are indistinguishable at any zoom that fits them both on screen, and the places that matter are a hundred metres long. So here is a tool that does the hunting: compare-tracks.html takes an original plus up to two conversions and reports every stretch where they part company, which OpenStreetMap ways each line is on, and whether the turn instructions agree. Here is one thing it found, and the thing it missed.

Anvers or Antwerpen? The Map Now Speaks Your Language

September 5, 2026 5 min read

Features Product

The same corner of Belgium, twice. On the left the map is set to French, on the right to Dutch, and almost every name has changed. PitStopper's map labels now follow the language you use the app in - and because place names and street names behave very differently, there is an override for people who want them apart.

Track to Route: Convert a Recorded GPS Track into a Turn-by-Turn Route (Alpha)

September 4, 2026 18 min read

You rode something good and the GPS wrote down roughly where you went. New in PitStopper (Alpha): a track to route converter. Match to Roads matches your recorded GPX or FIT track to the OpenStreetMap road network, redraws it along the roads you actually used, and turns it into a turn-by-turn route you can navigate in Cruiser or Locus Map. Here is what it does, what it will not do, and where it still trips up.

Turn Your GPX Route into a Video: The Complete Route Video Guide

September 4, 2026 10 min read

Features Visualization

Load a GPX or FIT file, press Record, and get an MP4 of your ride flying over 3D terrain. Route Video has grown a long way past the flyover it started as: eight cameras, a shot list, satellite imagery, an elevation profile, place captions, ride data, music and a title card. This is what every setting does, with short example clips of each.

Naming the Hills: Peaks on the Map

August 23, 2026 5 min read

You are planning a route through hills you have never ridden, and the elevation profile shows a serious climb at 40 km. What are you actually going over? A new peaks layer answers that at the planning stage.

Plan a route without leaving PitStopper

August 21, 2026 4 min read

PitStopper now has its own route planner - a simple, effective way to build a ride or walk and find the POIs along it, without juggling a second tool. It's in beta, and we'd love your feedback.

Share Project: Send Your Route as a Link, Not a File

August 18, 2026 3 min read

Features Product

Sending a planned route to someone usually means exporting a file and hoping they open it in PitStopper. Share Project skips all of that: pick how long a link stays live, share it or the QR code, and anyone can open it straight in their browser - encrypted the whole way, and updatable later without sending a new link.

Down the South Island: Planning a Camper-van or Motorcycle Tour

August 8, 2026 6 min read

Route Recon Tutorials

Camper-van or motorbike, the job is the same: where do we sleep, where do we fuel up, where do we shop? Here is a full-length South Island tour going from a bare BRouter track to a printable campsite shortlist - then back later for fuel and supermarkets.

Where Do You Sleep on the Indian Pacific?

August 1, 2026 6 min read

Fremantle to the Sydney Opera House: 5,468 km, 34,600 m of climbing, and the emptiest roads in world cycling. We surveyed every place to sleep within 2 km of the old Indian Pacific Wheel Race course. With a credit card, the worst night gap is 370 km. With a tent, it drops to 147 km - and that stretch has a name you already know.

Take Your Stops With You: Export POIs to Cruiser, Locus Map and Beyond

July 29, 2026 6 min read

You scouted the water, food and fuel in PitStopper. Now put those stops on the map you actually navigate with. A new export saves just your POIs - as universal GPX waypoints, or a native Mapsforge .poi that Cruiser and Locus open as a proper, categorised POI layer.

The Navigation Hidden in Your GPX: Turn Cues, Viapoints and Surface

July 27, 2026 11 min read

Open most GPX files and you get a line on a map: latitude, longitude, maybe elevation. But some tracks carry far more - turn cues, named viapoints and surface notes, tucked inside the trackpoints themselves. Most tools throw all of that away on import. PitStopper now keeps it, shows it, and writes it back out intact.

Two Nights Around Mont Blanc: Mapping Darkness on the 2026 UTMB

July 25, 2026 8 min read

The UTMB's aid stations are handled. What the roadbook doesn't tell you: where night actually catches YOU. We mapped sunset, sunrise, 17 refuges and 24 shelters against a mid-pack pace - headtorches on halfway up Grand Col Ferret.

Nudge Your Route Onto the Coffee Stop: Track Editing Arrives (Beta)

July 20, 2026 3 min read

Features Product

Your route is 95% right, but it misses the one cafe you actually wanted. Until now that meant re-opening a full route planner. New in PitStopper (Beta): tap the track, drag a point past the stop, and it snaps to the road - with the length and climb change shown live and the original kept as a dotted line for comparison.

The 99 Index: Every Ice Cream Stop on the London to Brighton

July 20, 2026 5 min read

The organisers of the 13 September London to Brighton Cycle promise water stops and toilets. They say nothing about ice cream. So we loaded the route into PitStopper, set the search radius down to 50 metres, and counted every freezer you will pass without leaving the road: 54 shops, garages and bakeries, plus a handful of actual gelato counters. The catch is where they are - and where they very much are not.

Chasing the Sunset in the Land of the Rising Sun

July 18, 2026 8 min read

Chase The Sun is coming to Japan: sunrise over Tokyo Bay on 29 May 2027, sunset over Suruga Bay, around 210 km and 3,000 m of mountains in between. The official route stays secret until autumn - so we drew a plausible one and surveyed it. Directly on the roadside of our guess: 129 konbini, one every 1.8 km. On average. The mountains have other ideas.

One Lap of Spa: What's Within a Kilometre of the F1 Belgian Grand Prix?

July 18, 2026 5 min read

A racetrack is just a 7 km loop with opinions, so we loaded Spa into PitStopper like any other route. OSM's mappers have been busy: fan tunnels under Raidillon, every spectator tap and toilet, the paddock parking - all pinned to the lap.

Your Route, Already Loaded

July 12, 2026 5 min read

Technical Product

We built a quiet prefetch that runs while you're taking in the route. After about 2-3 seconds, all 70-odd built-in POI categories are fetched and cached at a 1km radius - turning a one-per-search network cost into a once-per-load cost, and the radius slider into a pure local control.

POI Searches Just Got Up To 20× Faster

July 11, 2026 9 min read

Technical News

Searching for POIs along a long route used to mean firing off dozens of Overpass queries - and on routes like London to Edinburgh, a search that might never finish. As of today, searches run on a new PostGIS-backed engine that answers the whole route in a single indexed query. Here's what changed, the numbers, and how we got there.

The North Race: 24 Hours, There and Back, and a Night With No Open Shops

July 11, 2026 7 min read

Noon to noon, Leeds to as-far-north-as-your-legs-allow. Our 472 km plan reaches Scotland by headtorch - and between a Spar at 19:47 and a corner shop that opens at 05:00, the model says there is nothing open for over nine hours.

Race Around Québec 2026: Planning 1,000 km of Resupply, One Day at a Time

July 4, 2026 5 min read

Unsupported means the shops ARE your support crew. We split the Race Around Québec's 1,000 km route into five days and mapped all 732 resupply points - from Montréal's block-by-block dépanneurs to the Laurentian day with five fuel stops in 203 km.

The Case of the Zero-Kilometre Course Points

June 30, 2026 13 min read

Technical

A few users reported that their GPX waypoints all imported into Garmin Connect at "0 km from the start" - in the right place on the map, but with no distance. We built a pile of test files to find out why, and the answer turned out to be a single, undocumented number.

Six Hundred Taps: Water-Planning a 4,914 km Transcontinental in One Search

June 27, 2026 7 min read

The Transcontinental is the gold standard of self-supported long-distance cycling. We loaded a full 4,914 km crossing - Santiago de Compostela to Constanța - and searched for drinking water. Within twenty metres of the wheel: 283 taps. Within a hundred: 662, one every 7.4 km on average - except for one 500 km stretch where the map goes almost silent.

Lloyds Tour of Britain Pub Crawl: Every Pub Within 100 m of the 2026 Route

June 20, 2026 15 min read

Five stages, 910 km, 171 pubs within 100 metres of the race line. We mapped the Lloyds Tour of Britain Men 2026 pub by pub - including which ones have a 5-star hygiene rating for your mid-ride pie.

Detour de France: The Castles Beside the 2026 Tour de France Route

June 13, 2026 4 min read

Forget the water bottles - what if you followed the 2026 Tour de France for the scenery? We counted the castles, forts and ancient sites beside every stage. It's château all the way down.

Flag a Few, Export Just Those - Introducing Flagged POIs

June 7, 2026 4 min read

A PitStopper user wanted to keep a long list of possible stops but only send a chosen few to their GPS. So we added Flagged POIs - a second mark, separate from starred, with a "Flagged only" export option.

Why Garmin Connect Deletes Your Waypoints (and How We Fixed It with the help of a PitStopper user)

June 6, 2026 7 min read

You carefully place a cafe stop or water point in PitStopper, send the file to your Garmin, and it vanishes. A PitStopper user worked out why - and here is the new export feature that stops it.

The England Coast Path Opens Today

March 19, 2026 1 min read

News

The King Charles III England Coast Path is officially open - 2,700 miles around the entire English coastline. Combined with Wales and Scotland, you can now walk 4,500+ miles of British coast. Here's how PitStopper helps you plan.

Multi-Loop Planner for Endurance Events

March 1, 2026 2 min read

If you ride multi-loop endurance events, the new Multi-Loop Planner helps you build a race plan with timing, breaks, scoring, and sunrise/sunset info - then load each route into PitStopper to find fuel and water stops.

February 2026 Roundup - FIT, Weather & Fuel

February 28, 2026 3 min read

News Features

A busy February! Here's a roundup of the big features like FIT file support and historical weather, plus the smaller quality-of-life improvements that make PitStopper better every day.

Historical Weather: Know What to Expect on Your Route

February 16, 2026 4 min read

Wondering what the weather is usually like for your planned ride or hike? PitStopper's new Historical Weather feature pulls 5 years of real weather data for your route date, so you can see what conditions to expect.

Bulk POI Editor - Edit All Your Waypoints

February 15, 2026 3 min read

The new Bulk POI Editor gives you a spreadsheet-style table view of every POI along your route. Rename, add notes, star starred, and delete - all from one full-screen table.

Garmin FIT File Support - Import, Plan & Export

February 15, 2026 4 min read

PitStopper now supports Garmin FIT files alongside GPX. Import FIT courses from Ride with GPS, Garmin Connect and more. Discover POIs along your route and export enhanced FIT files back to your device.

Fuel Prices & Opening Times Across Europe

February 11, 2026 5 min read

PitStopper now shows live fuel prices and opening hours for petrol stations across the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. A handy feature for planning stops on long routes.

January 2026 Roundup - Demo Routes & More

January 31, 2026 2 min read

News Features

As January draws to a close, here's a quick roundup of the demo routes, address lookup, Query POI improvements, and other small additions we've made to PitStopper this month.

Split Route - Divide Long Routes into Daily Stages

January 30, 2026 3 min read

Planning a multi-day cycling tour or hiking trip? Our new Split Route feature lets you divide a long route into separate daily stages, making it easy to export individual GPX files for each day of your adventure.

Beta Feature: Custom Tags - Search Any OpenStreetMap Feature

January 27, 2026 4 min read

PitStopper now lets you create custom POI categories using OpenStreetMap tags. Search for windmills along your cycle route, find lighthouses on a coastal walk, or discover any other type of map feature that matters to you.

Introducing Help Mode - Contextual Help at Your Fingertips

January 27, 2026 2 min read

Features Tutorials

Not sure what a button does? Help Mode shows contextual help icons throughout PitStopper. Click any icon to learn more about that feature.

Beta Feature: Location Explorer - Photos & Wikipedia

January 27, 2026 3 min read

Right-click anywhere on your route to discover street-level photography and local Wikipedia articles, giving you a deeper understanding of places you'll visit on your journey.

Beta Features: Hazards & Obstacles and Surface Info

January 25, 2026 2 min read

We're testing two new features that help you understand your route better - Hazards & Obstacles detection and Surface Info analysis. Try them out and let us know what you think.

Find the Best Views with Peaks & Valleys

January 25, 2026 2 min read

Click the ascent or descent stats in the footer to instantly highlight the top 5 peaks or lowest 5 valleys on your route. Perfect for planning photo stops and finding the best viewpoints.

Multi-Route Support for Multi-Day Trip Planning

January 23, 2026 2 min read

PitStopper now supports loading multiple routes at once. Perfect for planning multi-day cycling trips, comparing different route options, or organizing event stages - all with POI discovery across all your routes.

Map Layer Improvements: More Options and Faster Loading

January 22, 2026 2 min read

New Hillshade and Terrain map layers give you more ways to visualize your routes, while our self-hosted tile cache delivers faster, more reliable map loading.

New Right-Click Context Menus for Quick Actions

January 19, 2026 4 min read

We've added right-click context menus throughout PitStopper, making it faster and easier to explore your route and manage your POIs.

Cycling Madeira: Finding Water Taps on My Route

January 18, 2026 4 min read

When you're cycling 80km with over 2,500m of climbing in Madeira's mountains, knowing where to refill your water bottles isn't just convenient - it's essential. Here's how I used PitStopper to plan my water stops.

Take Flight Over Your Route: 3D Animated Flyover with Elevation Sync

January 17, 2026 9 min read

Features Visualization

PitStopper's new Route Flyover feature lets you experience your route as an immersive 3D animation-perfect for understanding terrain, sharing adventures, and pre-visualizing your journey.

Faster POI Lookups: Our Own Overpass Server

January 14, 2026 4 min read

Technical News

We're excited to announce a major infrastructure improvement: PitStopper now runs its own Overpass server, resulting in faster and more reliable POI searches for all users.

Behind the Scenes: A Cleaner Codebase for Faster Features

January 5, 2026 2 min read

Technical News

PitStopper looks and works exactly the same, but under the hood we've completely reorganised our code. Here's why that matters for you.

Happy New Year 2026! Introducing Starred

January 5, 2026 2 min read

Happy New Year! We're kicking off 2026 with a much-requested feature - mark your starred POIs and filter to see only the stops that matter to you.

GPXFIT: Edit and Analyze Your GPS Activity Files

December 18, 2025 3 min read

GPXFIT is a powerful companion tool to PitStopper that helps you edit, validate, and analyze your recorded GPS activities. Clean up your files, check elevation data, and export in multiple formats.

Plan Your Perfect Pub Stop with PitStopper

December 13, 2025 2 min read

Discover pubs and cafes along your cycling or walking route, with UK Food Hygiene Ratings to help you choose the best stops.

Visualize Your GPX Route in 3D Terrain

November 28, 2025 4 min read

Features Visualization

PitStopper's new 3D Map feature brings your routes to life with realistic terrain visualization, helping you understand the landscape and plan for terrain challenges.

Understanding Time Estimation in PitStopper

November 25, 2025 6 min read

Tutorials Technical

How does PitStopper know how long your trip will take? We explain GPX timestamps, our gradient-adjusted speed model, and when you should use your route planner's timing instead.

How PitStopper Uses Public APIs

November 21, 2025 4 min read

Technical

Learn how PitStopper leverages public APIs for POI data, elevation, and maps - all while keeping your route data private in your browser.

Finding POIs Around Any Location

November 20, 2025 2 min read

Discover how to use PitStopper to find restaurants, water sources, and services around any location without needing a GPX route. Perfect for trip planning.

Creating Custom Presets for Your Activity

November 19, 2025 3 min read

Tutorials

Build and save custom POI presets tailored to your specific activity. Learn how to configure per-category search distances and POI limits, then save presets to browser storage or as files for easy sharing and portability.

Understanding POIs and Waypoints: A Guide

November 19, 2025 3 min read

Tutorials

Confused by the terminology across different route planning platforms? Learn the difference between POIs, waypoints, course points, and highlights. Understand how Komoot, Strava, Garmin, and other tools handle route markers, and how PitStopper simplifies the approach.

Getting the Most from Clock Time Features

November 14, 2025 4 min read