Routing that avoids roads you've already ridden

There is a specific kind of boredom that arrives in year two of riding. You know your good roads. You know which corner tightens and where the gravel collects. You still enjoy it, but the Sunday morning question — where shall we go? — has a very short list of answers, and you have used them all.

Curvy routing does not fix this. It will keep finding you the best road nearby, correctly, forever.

Avoid-visited routing does fix it, and the mechanism is simple enough to explain in full.

What the router is actually given

Every stretch of road has its own identity on the map. When you record a ride, it is matched to the road network, which turns your cloud of GPS points into a list of the specific stretches you demonstrably rode.

Those are stored against your account. Not “a ride on 12 May”, but “these 340 stretches of road, confirmed”.

When you plan a route with avoid-visited on, the planner is told, in effect: these stretches cost several times more than usual. It then does what it always does — finds the cheapest way through — but the arithmetic has changed underneath it, and the cheapest way now goes somewhere else.

Penalty, not prohibition

This distinction matters more than anything else in the feature.

If ridden roads were banned, the app would routinely fail. The road out of your street is ridden. The only bridge over the river is ridden. The single sealed road out of the valley is ridden. A hard ban produces “no route found”, which is useless.

So they are made expensive instead. The router will happily use a ridden road when the alternative is a 40-kilometre detour or no route at all, and will avoid it the moment anything reasonable exists. In practice this means:

• Leaving home usually uses familiar roads for the first few kilometres. That is correct and unavoidable.
• The interesting middle third of the ride is where the feature does its work.
• You never get a dead end, an error, or a route that crosses a paddock to avoid a highway.

What it costs you

Honest trade, stated plainly: routes get slightly less curvy when you turn this on.

Of course they do. Your local roads are on the excluded list precisely because they are good and you have therefore ridden them. What is left is, on average, a notch below.

What you get back is a road you have never seen. A crest you do not know the far side of. A town you have driven past for six years without turning into. Most riders find that the unfamiliar road at 90% curviness beats the perfect road at 100% that they can ride from memory — and if you disagree on a given day, switch it off. It is a toggle, not a philosophy.

Practical settings

Weak penalty. Nudges the route away from the most-ridden roads while keeping the day’s obvious highlights. Good for a ride with guests who have not done your local classics.

Strong penalty. Actively hunts for new tarmac. Best for a solo Sunday when the point is exploration, and the setting where you will discover that the unremarkable-looking road behind the industrial estate is actually excellent.

Off. For the days when you want the good road because it is the good road. No shame in it.

How it stays honest

The feature is only worth anything if “ridden” means ridden. If the app marked roads as done because you planned them, or because it guessed you probably continued, your map would slowly fill with lies and the router would start avoiding roads you have never seen.

So the rule is strict and it is worth knowing as a user:

• Only real GPS points recorded during a ride are eligible.
• Where a recording gap is filled in from the planned route so the trip line looks continuous, those filled sections are flagged as assumed and are never counted as ridden.
• Manually saying “I rode this” does not mark it either, unless you later record a GPS pass over it.

That is deliberately conservative. It means your map sometimes lags reality after a phone died mid-ride — and it means that when a road is orange, you were definitely there. A ridden-roads map with a 5% lie in it is worthless; the whole feature rests on the data being trustworthy.

Where it goes next

Two extensions riders ask about most:

Time decay. A road ridden three years ago is arguably new again. Treating age as part of the penalty is a natural next step.

Direction. Many roads are a different ride the other way, so having ridden it northbound arguably should not exclude it southbound. Direction-aware avoidance is genuinely useful and genuinely fiddly.

Both are on the list. In the meantime, the simple version already does the main job: it makes the app stop suggesting the same road, which is the reason most riders stop opening a route planner in the first place.

If you want the fully hands-off version of this, Surprise Me does the choosing for you — same avoidance, no waypoints to place.