Motorcycles and quad bikes in planner
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Currently we need to select Gravel Bike to plan routes on trails that are perfectly usable with motorcycles and quad bikes. While this works, it's not intuitive, so adding more types would attract more users!
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Hi Guntars,
Thanks for the suggestion and for sharing how you're currently working around it — it's good to know the Gravel Bike profile gets you most of the way there.
You're right that we have a sizeable community of motorcyclists, quad riders, and 4x4 enthusiasts among our users, and we genuinely appreciate that. That said, our development focus has always been on non-motorized outdoor activities — hiking, cycling, running, ski touring, and similar — and that's where we put most of our effort when it comes to dedicated routing profiles.
There's also a practical reason we've been cautious about adding motorized off-road profiles: legal access for motor vehicles on unpaved tracks varies enormously from country to country, and in many places it's heavily restricted or outright prohibited on forest roads, field tracks, and protected areas. Those restrictions are often not consistently tagged in the OpenStreetMap data our routers rely on, which means a dedicated motorcycle or quad profile could quite easily send riders onto trails they're not legally allowed to use. That's a responsibility we don't take lightly, both toward our users and toward the landowners and natural environments involved.
For now, the Gravel Bike profile is a reasonable workaround in the web planner. If you'd like more control on Android, BRouter (our partner offline routing engine) supports fully custom profiles — riders in the community have built their own .brf files tuned for tracks and unpaved roads. It's a bit more hands-on, but it gives you a lot of flexibility.
Hi Guntars,
Thanks for the suggestion and for sharing how you're currently working around it — it's good to know the Gravel Bike profile gets you most of the way there.
You're right that we have a sizeable community of motorcyclists, quad riders, and 4x4 enthusiasts among our users, and we genuinely appreciate that. That said, our development focus has always been on non-motorized outdoor activities — hiking, cycling, running, ski touring, and similar — and that's where we put most of our effort when it comes to dedicated routing profiles.
There's also a practical reason we've been cautious about adding motorized off-road profiles: legal access for motor vehicles on unpaved tracks varies enormously from country to country, and in many places it's heavily restricted or outright prohibited on forest roads, field tracks, and protected areas. Those restrictions are often not consistently tagged in the OpenStreetMap data our routers rely on, which means a dedicated motorcycle or quad profile could quite easily send riders onto trails they're not legally allowed to use. That's a responsibility we don't take lightly, both toward our users and toward the landowners and natural environments involved.
For now, the Gravel Bike profile is a reasonable workaround in the web planner. If you'd like more control on Android, BRouter (our partner offline routing engine) supports fully custom profiles — riders in the community have built their own .brf files tuned for tracks and unpaved roads. It's a bit more hands-on, but it gives you a lot of flexibility.
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