Different distances for same .gpx route

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• Julien Plotaroute   Monday 08 Jun 2026 13:27:51

  Hi Laurent,

  I'm sorry to say that so far, there has been no progress on this matter.

  What I can share however, is that we haven't deliberately changed something that explains why all of a sudden distances are not the same as they used to be a few months ago.

  Therefore, this sadly isn't something the devs can simply roll back, and they are still looking into what has caused this change.

  I'll make sure to update this topic as soon as I receive any news.

  Kind regards,
  Julien

• Laurent LARUAZ   Monday 08 Jun 2026 09:26:27

  Hi 

  Distance shown on Plotaroute still very erratic, no improvement for the time being. 

  It would be so grat if your team could go back to the older system which worked pefectly fine. 

  Best regards

   

• Julien Plotaroute   Tuesday 12 May 2026 10:40:08

  Hi Laurent and Alessio,

  Thanks for bringing this to our attention and for providing examples.
  Other users got in touch with us to raise issues with distances as well.

  I have reopened the previous bug report and will discuss this with the devs again.

  I'll update this topic as soon as I receive any news.

  All the best,
  Julien

• Aurelie MAGNIN   Thursday 07 May 2026 14:07:00

  Hello Laurent and Alessio,

  
  I'm Aurélie, one of Julien's colleague.

  
  Tech team is asking to get the GPX you are talking about to check more precisely what is happening.

  Could you please send me GPX via the help desk ? and add what are the real values you are expecting (if you know it)

   

  Kins regards,

• Laurent LARUAZ   Thursday 07 May 2026 08:24:12

  I also noticed that when correcting a route (for instance cutting through a roundabout for a cycling race); the distance shown which should be lower is sometimes higher - and vice versa. 

  Finally it seems the distance shown on the screen works in an utterly erratic way. 

  Like Alessio I found this is a new fault which appeared quite recently. 

  Please ask your developers to correct it as it ruins the fantastic experience we had with plotaroute.

• Alessio Basso   Thursday 07 May 2026 06:41:46

  After further testing, it looks like that distance markers are generated correctly when exporting the kml from the website. However, route distance shown in the dashboard is not.

• Alessio Basso   Thursday 07 May 2026 05:56:33

  I confirmed that something must have been changed recently in the way the route distance is calculated when a file is uploaded.

  I am the television producer for cycling races like Giro d'Italia and Milano - Sanremo. I always use plotaroute to reverse the route and generate km markers, before exporting the kml and adding the other information we need (points of interest, sprints, etc.). So we always have a reference of km to go that matches with the information coming from tv graphics and gps on the motorbikes.

  I used this workflow for races in March and everything worked fine. Now, the Giro d'Italia starts tomorrow, but I can't used this method anymore, and this is very frustrating. I am experiencing differences up to 4 or 5 kms in the route distance.

  Please get the algorythm back where it was!

• Laurent LARUAZ   Thursday 23 Apr 2026 16:29:51

  Hi

  Thank you for the time and research you and your workmates for trying to address the problem I encounterd. 

  However the site worked perfectly until recently, so I can only guess that a change has been made in the software settings, leading to this difference. 

  Also a 2 km difference on a 150 km ride is for me quite significant ; truth to be said, other .gpx files showed smaller discrepancies, so I guess I will have to get used to this.

  Kind regards

• Julien Plotaroute   Wednesday 22 Apr 2026 11:54:06

  Hi Laurent,

  I just talked this over with the devs, and here is what they told me:

  The distance of a route can vary because the value/coordinates of single points can be slightly rounded up/down. Especially on long routes, with a lot of points, this rounding up/down can add up to a difference, as you have reported.

  As long as the difference is not significant, this is not a bug. 

  The devs told me that the most important thing is that this difference will not impact the ability to follow the route.

  I hope this clears things up a bit.

  All the best,
  Julien

• Julien Plotaroute   Friday 10 Apr 2026 07:06:07

  Hi Laurent,

  Thanks for providing such a detailed bug report.

  To confirm your finding, I tested importing the GPX to Visorando, and the result is yet another: 151,79km vs 150.699 on Plotaroute and 152.8km on RwGPS.

  I don't know how this is handled on the tech side, so I'll share this with the devs.

  I'll update this topic as soon as I receive any news on this.

  All the best,
  Julien