For a long time PitStopper did one job: you brought a route in from somewhere else - Komoot, RideWithGPS, Strava, Garmin - and we found the water, food, fuel and everything else along it. That still works exactly as before. But it always meant planning in one app and enhancing in another.
Not any more. PitStopper now has its own route planner, and it's built right into the app.
Windsor Castle to Buckingham Palace - search a start and a finish, watch the pins snap onto the road network, let BRouter offer its alternatives, pick one and press Done. The POI search is waiting on the other side. It plays once; use the controls to watch it again.
Simple on purpose
Let's be upfront: this is not trying to out-feature Komoot or RideWithGPS. Those are excellent, deep tools, and if you live inside one of them you'll probably keep doing so.
What we kept hearing, though, is that a lot of rides don't need all of that. You want to sketch a sensible line from A to B, maybe drop a couple of stops, see how far it is and how much climbing it involves, and get on with it. For that, bouncing between two websites is friction.
So we built a planner that's deliberately simple - and, we think, enough to satisfy most rides and walks. Building the route inside PitStopper means the POIs come with it: the moment you're done, your water stops, cafes and resupply points are already on the map. One tool, one flow.
We're wary of bloating it, so we're starting small and honest about what it does.
What you can do
Open Plan a route from the home page (or Menu → Plan a route in the app) and you get:
- Waypoints - click the map to drop a start, a finish, and any stops in between. Drag points to move them, reorder or delete them in the list, and search for a place to drop it straight in. Every change reroutes instantly, with undo and redo.
- Grab the line - not happy with a stretch? Drag the route line itself onto the road you'd rather take and it reroutes through there.
- Activity and profile - cycling, walking or hiking, each with routing profiles (road, gravel, quiet lanes and so on) and an advanced panel to avoid busy roads, stick to cycle routes or penalise unpaved surfaces.
- Alternatives and compare - up to three routes for the same start and finish, drawn in different colours. Open Compare to see them on one elevation chart, with a table that flags which is shortest, which climbs least and which is quickest.
- Round trips - set just a start and ask for "about 40km"; PitStopper spins a loop that comes back to where you began.
- Turn notes and nav export - optionally turn the directions into info points along the route, and export a turn-by-turn track that apps like Cruiser and Locus understand.
When you press Done, the route behaves exactly like any GPX you'd have uploaded - search POIs, read the elevation, edit the track, export or save it.
Powered by BRouter
The routing itself is handled by BRouter, a well-respected open-source engine used by many offline navigation apps. It's good at cycling and walking specifically - not just "shortest by car" - and its profiles are what let us offer road, gravel and quiet-lane variants. We run our own BRouter server so it stays fast and reliable, with the public instance as a fallback.
As always, your route never touches our servers for anything private: the planner talks to the routing engine to draw the line, and that's it.
It's a beta - tell us what you think
We're calling this beta for a reason. It's new, it's intentionally lean, and the direction it takes from here should be shaped by the people using it. If something's missing, awkward, or just not behaving, we'd genuinely like to hear it - the good and the bad.
Get in touch, and give it a go: plan a route.
