Adding Detours to Route MapsFORUMS HOME SEARCH FORUMS

The plotaroute.com route planner is already one of the most sophisticated online route planners available, but today we've taken it to a new level by adding the ability to show multiple variations to a route on one map.

Our new Plot a Detour feature enables you to show shortcuts, extensions, diversions or indeed any type of alternative way that deviates from the main route. Detours are shown on the map with dashed lines in a variety of colours. They are 'hot swappable', so you can easily make them part of the route by clicking on them. This makes it very quick and easy to see how detours affect the length of the route and its elevation profile, by simply toggling between the detour and the main route.

You can also label any detours you've added by using our existing map annotation features, which allow you to display text labels on the map in matching colours. Here is an example:

To see how detours work once added to a route, take a look at the following example: example of a route with a detour.

We've written some instructions for plotting detours, which you can find in the Tips and Tricks section of the site and we've also produced a short demo video, so you can see this new feature in action.

We believe that there are many potential use cases for the new Plot a Detour feature and it's been one of our most popular feature requests, so we're very pleased to have been able to introduce this right across the site. We hope that lots of you will find it useful.

This is really a great feature. It will be interesting to try it out more next time I want to run an alterative route.

It will be interesting to see how directions and fit export work. I'm thinking that if I need different directionswhere the route split, depending of what alternative I picked,  I can manually put the two different directions a couple of meters after the split.

Thanks Peter, glad you like this. Yes, you could add directions near the split as you suggest.  Perhaps it would be helpfui though if we automatcially added a direction at the start of any new detour saying "Start of detour", then it would be located exactly at the point where the route splits and you could easily edit it by clicking on it in the list of directions?

John 

My use case is to have saved alterative routes to be able to download later. I will probably forget to change it then.

One maybe complicated option would be

- if there is a dir where I start the detour, duplicate the dir directly after.

- if not auto generate two dir on the diff paths.

I really like the look of this - I have a lot of fairly similar long run routes which only vary by detours to add extra mileage and climb.

Hi, John!

Alternative route selection does not work on mobile pages :(

(Android)

Hi Mikhail,

I think it's probably just that it's a bit fiddly on a small screen.  It's working OK for me on an Android phone but you do have to tap around the line a bit to hit it, as you can't click precisely with your finger like you can with a mouse. We could try making the detour line a bit bigger on a mobile device to see if this helps - we'll have a look at that.

John

I zoomed out as much as possible, it switches really.
John try your option, this should help

We've changed it to make the detour lines thicker if you're viewing a route on a touchscreen device, so it should hopefully be a little bit easier to select detours now on smartphones.

John 

Guys this is exactly what I had requested, perfect!

Thanks

Leigh

Hi John!
What about deours in begin or end route ?

I would make separate buttons for these features.

1. Alternative start

When you press it, you build a route along the point and it should end on a track point (Confirm appears when you select a track point)

2. Alternative finish

When you press it, you select a track point and then build a route by points (Confirm appears immediately)

Hi John, this is a great feature for when I'm doing route planning, thanks! After the planning though when I'm pretty settled on which route I want to use it would be good to delete the detours that I know I will not use - is there a way I can do that?

Hi Tour McTour!

Glad you like the new detours feature. That's a great idea using it during route planning to try out alternative options. In answer to your question, yes, you can delete detours you don't want - when editing the route in the route planner, right-click on the detour to bring up the edit/delete options (see our Tip on adding detours for more info).  

Mikhail - I just noticed I dodn't respond to your suggestion below to support adding alternative starts and finishes - sorry I missed that one.  That's a good idea.  Not sure how easy it would be to build that in but it's something we can think about.

John

Just started using the Detour feature.  It ROCKS!  Thank You and keep the innovation coming!!!!

I added two detours on a route, but when I print, only one detour shows up.

What did I miss?

Hi Bill - it looks like that may be a bug. We'll look into it and report back.

Hello again Bill - we've implemented a fix for the problem you reported, so it should hopefully be OK now.

That worked, thanks.