Route planner
A walking route planner that starts from your steps
Most planners ask you to draw a line on a map. Stroll>On asks how many steps you have left, then finds real walking routes from where you are standing that add up to exactly that.
What makes it different
Distance-matched, not distance-guessed
You give it steps, not kilometres. It converts them with your own step length and aims at the exact distance that lands you on your goal.
Loops from where you stand
Circular walks that start and finish at your current location, so there is no working out how to get home when the steps run out.
Alternatives, not one verdict
Up to 3 genuinely different routes near the same distance, so you can pick the direction you fancy today.
Out-and-back, or to a destination
Walk out and turn round at the halfway point, or aim at the shops, the station or a friend’s house and take a longer way there.
Hills before you leave
Total ascent and an elevation profile for every route, plus a prefer-flatter option when your legs are not in the mood.
GPX export
Send a route to a watch or another app. It is your walk; it should not be locked inside ours.
Works as an app on your phone
Add it to your home screen and it opens full screen. The map area you last looked at stays available if you lose signal.
No account, no tracking
Nothing to sign up to, no advertising trackers, and your settings and saved walks stay on your device.
How the route engine works
In plain words, with no maths.
- 1
Turn steps into a target distance
Your remaining steps are multiplied by your step length. That single number — a distance in metres — is what everything downstream aims at.
- 2
Generate several candidate loops
Rather than drawing one circle, the planner asks a routing engine for 6 round trips in different directions and with different shapes, all sized near your target.
- 3
Score each candidate
Every candidate gets a score built from four things: how close it lands to your target distance, how much of it doubles back on itself, what kinds of path it uses, and how much climbing it involves.
- 4
Nudge the near misses
Real pavements never come out at exactly the distance requested, so candidates that are close but outside your tolerance get re-requested slightly bigger or smaller.
- 5
Keep the best distinct routes
Candidates that overlap each other too much are dropped, because three versions of the same walk is not a choice. What is left is ranked, and the best few are what you see.
There is a hard ceiling on how many requests one button press may make, so the planner works within a budget rather than searching forever. That is why it comes back in seconds and why it will sometimes tell you honestly that it could not get closer than a certain distance.
Being straight with you about the numbers
Every route card shows the distance, the predicted step count, the difference from your target, the estimated time and the total ascent. The prediction comes from your step length, so it is an estimate of your steps rather than a measurement — and the difference is displayed rather than rounded away, because +40 steps is a fact about the walk and hiding it would be a small lie.
We do not describe routes as scenic or quiet, because we cannot see them. What we can say is that the planner prefers footpaths, parks and residential streets over main roads where OpenStreetMap gives us enough information to tell the difference, and that it will say when it has had to route you along something busier.
Elevation figures come from an open dataset and are smoothed before ascent is totalled, which keeps a flat canal towpath from appearing to have hills in it. They are good enough to compare two routes, and not accurate enough to argue about a metre.
- Distance in kilometres and miles
- Predicted steps, and how far that is from your target
- Estimated time at your own walking pace
- Total ascent, with an elevation profile
- A warning when a main road could not be avoided
Route planner questions
What sort of distances can it plan?
Anything from about 300 m up to 30.0 km. That covers a few hundred steps to top up a day, and a long weekend walk.
Are the routes safe?
They are built from pedestrian-routable ways in OpenStreetMap, so they follow paths and pavements rather than fields and dual carriageways. They are still suggestions: you know your area, and you should check conditions, lighting and crossings for yourself.
Can it avoid busy roads?
It prefers quieter, greener ways where the map data supports it, and it tells you when a route has had to use a main road. Map data is not complete everywhere, so this is a preference rather than a guarantee.
Which map data does it use?
Routing comes from openrouteservice, which is built on OpenStreetMap data, and the map tiles come from OpenFreeMap. Both are credited in the footer of every page.
Does it need my location?
To plan from where you are, yes — your browser will ask permission first, and the coordinates are used to generate the route and then forgotten. You can also drop a pin somewhere else and plan from there.
Plan a walk from your doorstep
Give it the steps you have left. It will give you a route that fits, and tell you how close it got.