The motorcycle route planner

Why planning belongs on a big screen

Drawing a route on a phone is possible, but it is not comfortable. The map is small, you never see the whole ride at once, and dragging a waypoint along a 300 km (185 mile) line with your thumb is an exercise in patience. Planning goes much better sitting down, on a screen where you can see the valley you are crossing and the pass that comes after it at the same time.

That split of roles is deliberate: the web to prepare, the phone to ride. Both share the same account and the same routes, so what you put together on a Thursday evening is in your pocket on Sunday morning.

Taking the line back from the algorithm

An automatic calculation, however good, cannot guess that you absolutely want to ride the small road you spotted last year. The planner lets you drop a waypoint anywhere on the map to force the route through it, and rework a single segment without breaking the rest of the ride.

It matters most where the minor road network is dense, the causses of southern France, the Millevaches plateau, the lanes of Normandy, because that is where the gap between the optimal route and the good route is total. Two lines of the same length can produce completely different days out.

Free, and no account needed to try it

The planner opens and works without an account. You can draw, compare, measure the climb and walk away. An account only becomes useful when you want to keep a route, find it again on the phone or share it with someone.

Waver is in open beta and free. A few comfort features, folders among them, are meant to become paid later on. During the beta everybody has access to all of it.

Planning a European tour from abroad

Most people who ride the Alps or the Pyrenees plan them months ahead, from a kitchen table several hundred kilometres away, with a ferry or a Channel Tunnel slot already booked. The planner is built for exactly that: lay out one day at a time, check the climb before you commit to it, and keep the days of the trip together in a folder.

Routing runs on OpenStreetMap data and covers Europe, so a run from Calais or Zeebrugge down to the Col du Galibier is planned the same way as a Sunday loop at home. The site and the mobile app are both available in English.

• Be honest about daily distance: 250 to 350 km (155 to 220 miles) of mountain road is a full day, not a transit leg.
• Excluding motorways and tolls is one toggle, which is what you want if you would rather cross France on the D roads than pay for the A6.
• Rural fuel stations in France often close on Sundays and overnight, so plan the tank, not just the route.
• Save each day of the trip in its own folder so the whole tour stays in one place instead of six loose files.