Routing and avoidances

Routes are computed on your phone, from the road graph inside the region you downloaded. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is fetched, so a route takes the same moment to plan in the bush as it does at home.

Setting a destination

Two ways, and the quick one is usually enough:

From a result. Search for a place or tap a Nearby category, tap the result, and the place card gives you Route here.
From the map. Press and hold anywhere to drop a pin — the way to route to a spot with no name, like a put-in, a gate or the far end of a campground road. The same Route here button appears.

Either way the route starts from where you are, or from the middle of the map if there is no location fix yet.

Setting both ends yourself

To plan a trip you are not standing at the start of, open Directions. It has a From… and a To… field, each of which takes a name or a place you have picked on the map, the mode picker, the avoidance switches, and a Get route button. When you like the result, Use route draws it on the map.

Directions is also where you change the options on a route you already have — the place card’s Options button opens it.

Snapping, and why a point can be unroutable

Both ends of a route are snapped to the nearest road your travel mode is actually allowed to leave, within about 500 metres. A pin further than that from any usable road — the middle of a lake, deep inside a block of forest — has nothing to snap to, and you get No route found to that place.

The fix is to move the pin nearer a road. It is also why a start on a footpath does not produce a driving route that begins by driving down a footpath.

Travel modes

The mode picker offers Drive, Cycle and Walk, and it changes the answer rather than just the arrival time:

Drive — the road network a car may use, timed by road class and speed limit.
Cycle — roads and cycleways a bicycle is permitted on, timed at cycling pace, and one-way streets respected in the direction they are one-way.
Walk — footpaths, trails and sidewalks included, at a steady walking pace, and one-way restrictions on vehicles ignored, because walking up a one-way street is legal.

A road a mode is not allowed on is unavailable rather than merely expensive: a motorway never appears in a walking route, and a footpath never appears in a driving one.

Avoidances

Three switches in the Avoid row, all off by default:

Tolls — keeps the route off toll roads, Highway 407 among them.
Ferries — keeps it off ferry crossings, which matters when the schedule or the season is against you.
Unpaved — keeps it off gravel, dirt and forest tracks. What you want towing a trailer, and not what you want reaching a backcountry trailhead.

Each is a hard exclusion, not a preference: with one on, the route will not use that kind of road at all. So if no route exists — an island reachable only by ferry, a cottage at the end of six kilometres of gravel — turn that switch off rather than wondering what went wrong.

Routing with an avoidance on also takes a little longer to compute, noticeably so on a big province. Whatever you set is remembered and reused for reroutes, since a driver who asked to avoid ferries has not stopped meaning it because they missed a turn.

What the route already obeys

You do not have to switch these on; they come from the map data and are always honoured:

One-way streets, in the direction they are actually one-way.
Turn restrictions — no left turn, no U-turn, no entry — including the ones that only apply coming from a particular road.
Access restrictions — private roads and roads closed to your mode are not routed through. A “residents only” street is heavily penalised rather than banned, so it is used to reach a destination on it and almost never as a shortcut.
Ferries are treated as ferries, with their own crossing cost, rather than as ordinary road.

What routing does not know

Live traffic and closures. Not available. A route is planned on the map as it was when the region was built. Estimated times come from road classes and speed limits, not from conditions.
Vehicle height, weight and length. Planned. There is no low-bridge or truck-restriction avoidance today. If you are tall or heavy, check the route yourself.
Crossing a region boundary. Planned. A route is planned within one region; it cannot yet run from one downloaded region into another.

Reading the result

The route draws on the map with a summary bar under it: distance, estimated time, a Steps button for the full list of turns, and Start.

Look it over before you start, especially the last few kilometres, where a “road” in the data may turn out to be a seasonal track. When it looks right, start turn-by-turn.