RideBriefing › Paved, gravel or cobbles? Know your route's surface

Guide · Surface

Paved, gravel or cobbles? Know your route's surface

A route that looks perfect on the map can include two kilometres of loose gravel or a cobbled lane. RideBriefing matches your GPX route to OpenStreetMap and shows what's under your tyres, before you choose your bike and tyres.

What you get

• Surface breakdown: paved, gravel and compacted, dirt and trail, cobbles and setts, with the distance and share of each.
• Road types: cycle paths, quiet roads and lanes, minor, secondary and main roads, and farm or forest tracks. Useful to judge traffic, especially for a group.
• Along the profile: a surface strip under the elevation profile shows exactly where the unpaved sections are.
• Tyre advice: if more than 15% of the route is unpaved, RideBriefing recommends gravel tyres; for shorter sections, 28 mm or wider road tyres are usually fine in the dry.

Where the data comes from

The surface comes from OpenStreetMap, the map edited by volunteers worldwide. Your route is matched to the roads it follows using the Valhalla routing engine run by FOSSGIS. Where a road has no surface recorded, RideBriefing infers it from the road type: a residential street is almost always paved, a forest track usually isn't.

Coverage is excellent in most of Europe and good elsewhere, but not perfect: a recently resurfaced road or an unmapped track can be wrong. If you find an error, you can fix it in OpenStreetMap yourself, and every map that uses it improves.

Questions