Waymeld is a route planner for the routes you already have: mountain biking, road cycling, running, trail running, hiking and walking. You bring the routes. It works out how to reach them from the start you set, which point of each one to join, in what order and which direction to ride them, how to link them together and how to get you home — then exports all of it as one GPX file.
Waymeld exists because route planning breaks in specific, nameable ways. Each block below is one of those breakages — what it feels like, why it happens, and what Waymeld does about it — in order of how badly each one bites.
Problem 01
How do I plan a loop that starts at my house?
You find a loop worth riding. The file starts in a car park on the far side of it, because that is where the person who recorded it left the car. You are at your door with a bike, and the first thing the plan asks you to do is drive.
Getting from your door to a loop is a routing problem with a second half that nobody solves: which point of the loop should you join? The nearest point on the map is the obvious answer and it is often the wrong one. A river with no bridge, a dual carriageway, a fence line — two points forty metres apart on screen can be two kilometres apart on a bike.
What Waymeld does
Set the start to your own address and Waymeld samples candidate entry points along your route, then prices each one by routed cost from that start — the distance you would actually ride, not the distance across the map. It joins the route where the riding is cheapest, and it shows you where that is before you leave.
Measured
Delsjön loop, from an address on Härlandavägen. The nearest point on the loop is 3365 m away and costs 4668 m of riding to reach; a point 16 m further away costs 4239 m. That is 429 m of extra riding — 9.2 % — to save 16 m on the map.
Problem 02
Why does my watch say the ride is over while I am still far from home?
You are half way round a loop somebody else recorded, and your watch announces that you have arrived. Nothing has gone wrong. The file has ended, because you have reached the point where its author stopped riding.
A GPX track has a first point and a last point. On a loop they are the same place — the author’s place. Join that loop anywhere else and every number your device gives you is measured from a spot you have never been to: distance remaining, percentage complete, the chime at the end. Then the navigation is over and the ride is not. The part you most wanted guidance for is the ride home, and it was never in the file to begin with.
What Waymeld does
Waymeld rotates the loop onto the point where you join it, so the track begins and ends where you begin and end it. It is a rotation, not a recalculation: the same coordinates in the same order, started at a different one of them, so your line is preserved vertex for vertex. The ride out from your door and the ride home are then attached at either end, which makes the last point of the file your door.
The same four points, in the same places, in the same order. The only thing that changes is which one the file starts at.
Verified
Loop rotation preserves the rider’s geometry vertex for vertex: the line that comes out of a composition is the line that went in, compared rotation-aware, and a test fails the build if that ever stops being true.
Problem 03
How do I combine two GPX routes into one ride?
Two loops you like, fifteen kilometres apart. You select both, and what comes back is the first file followed by the second file, each ridden in the direction it was recorded, entered at whichever end happened to be first in the file.
Riding two routes from a door means four decisions at once: which route first, which end of each to enter, which way round to ride it, and how to link them. Those combinations do not score the same, and upload order picks one of them for reasons that have nothing to do with the ride.
What Waymeld does
Waymeld decides the order, the entry end, the direction and the connectors between them together, for up to four routes at a time, and it tells you how many orderings it compared rather than presenting one answer as though it were the only one.
Measured
Two routes composed from a Göteborg address: 98.8 km in total — 63.7 km of the rider’s own routes plus 35.1 km of generated connectors, with no access violations. 128 orderings were compared to get there.
Problem 04
Can I get one GPX file that covers the ride out and the ride home?
The trail is mapped. The four kilometres of streets to reach it are not, and neither is the way back at the end, which is the moment you least want to be standing at a junction reading a map.
A downloaded route covers the interesting part and stops. The roads out, the link between two trails, the way home: that is the part nobody publishes, and it is the part you actually need instructions for.
What Waymeld does
That is what the export is. One GPX file that runs from your door back to your door — your routes as you imported them, plus the connectors Waymeld generated to reach and link them, in a single track. The generated parts are drawn and counted as generated, so you can always see which line is yours and which line is Waymeld’s.
Measured
A 5.3 km Delsjön loop, composed from a Göteborg address into a 13.6 km ride, door to door, in 4 segments.
Problem 05
How much of this mountain bike route is actually asphalt?
A ride advertised as thirty-five kilometres of mountain biking can contain eighteen kilometres of asphalt, and the usual way to find that out is to ride it.
One total hides two things: how much of the distance you chose rather than the planner inventing it, and what is under the tyre along each part. A tool that generated half your ride has an incentive to report a single number, and where the map data says nothing about a surface, the tempting move is to guess and then present the guess as a fact.
What Waymeld does
Waymeld splits every total twice: your routes against what it generated, and then by surface. Where the underlying data does not say what a surface is, it is reported as unknown with its distance rather than folded into a guess, and stretches held with low confidence are named as low confidence instead of being hidden to make a summary look tidier.
Unknown surface is reported with its distance rather than rounded into a guess, because a surface nobody has recorded is a fact about the map and not a gap to fill in.
Measured
“61 % of this ride is not your route” is the headline of a Waymeld composition summary, not a detail buried inside one.
Problem 06
Can I tell the planner to avoid a road I know is bad?
There is a road the planner likes and you do not. Gravel lorries before nine, a junction with no sightline, a dog. You know it, the map does not, and no amount of training data is going to learn it.
The usual answer is a slider, which is an opinion about the whole ride when what you have is a fact about one road. So you move the slider, the entire ride changes shape, and the road is still in it.
What Waymeld does
Point at the road and avoid it. Waymeld rebuilds the leg that used it and leaves the rest of the ride alone, then checks the result against your avoids afterwards, so a road you excluded cannot come back in through the side door. A leg you like can be pinned and the rest routed around it, a connector can be dragged through a point you would rather use, every one of those edits can be undone and redone, and where there is more than one sensible answer Waymeld will show you the alternatives it found.
What gets rebuilt is the leg that used the road. Pinned sections and untouched connectors are reused rather than recomputed, so the rest of the ride stays where you left it.
Problem 07
Does Waymeld know which paths I am allowed to ride?
Push the off-road preference to the top and a lot of planners will happily send you down a track that is closed to bikes. The restriction was in the data. It lost a scoring contest.
Preference and permission are different kinds of thing. Once they are mixed into one score, a strong enough preference can outvote a legal restriction, and the ride you are handed is one you are not allowed to take.
What Waymeld does
Eligibility is a filter applied before anything is scored: a way you may not use is not a penalised option, it is not an option, and no slider position can put it back. The finished composition is then checked against the same rules again, because asking a routing engine to honour a restriction is not the same as being obeyed. Where the data does not say, Waymeld reports unknown access rather than inventing a verdict — in Sweden, where allemansrätten makes access the default, treating silence as a ban would be wrong about the law rather than merely cautious.
Nothing crosses the line unless it is eligible, and the sliders live entirely on the far side of it.
Not built yet
Asking Waymeld to invent a ride from a distance and a surface share
Everything above this box is built and running. This is not, and the page would not be worth much if it left you to find that out on your own.
The idea is that you give Waymeld a start, an activity, a distance and a share of the ride you want off the tarmac — forty kilometres, seventy per cent unpaved, from my door — with no route at all, and it goes and finds the ride. It is the next large piece of work rather than a feature waiting to be switched on. Today Waymeld needs at least one route from you to compose around: import a GPX file, or pick one out of your library.
Also not built, in case a missing menu item leaves you looking for it: sharing a ride with another rider, mobile apps, and a catalogue of routes other people have ridden. There is an account, and it is optional — importing, composing and exporting all work without one. What it adds is routes that survive a cleared browser, and a home address Waymeld can leave out of anything you publish.
One planner for mountain biking, road cycling, running, trail running, hiking and walking
The six are not labels on the same engine. Each one carries its own rules about which ways it may legally use, its own scoring, and its own reading of the OpenStreetMap difficulty tags: a path tagged sac_scale=T3 means something to a hiker and nothing at all to a road cyclist. Picking one changes what is eligible before it changes what is preferred.
Mountain biking
Paths, tracks and natural surfaces. Legal bicycle access enforced.
Road cycling
Paved, cycleable roads and cycleways. Low-stress preferred.
Running
Safe pedestrian network, paths and quiet streets.
Trail running
Paths, tracks and natural terrain, with the shortest useful connector.
Hiking
Paths, tracks and hiking routes. SAC scale and trail visibility matter.
Walking
Accessible pedestrian connections, sidewalks and crossings.
Bring one route and see what it does with it
Set a start, choose an activity, add a GPX file. What comes back is a ride from that start and back to it, with the split between your route and the connectors on the face of it, and one file at the end.
