Bolsover & District Cycling Club

Found this via an article on the BikeBiz website (http://www.bikebiz.com/news/31878/Google-Maps-adds-Bike-There-option).

http://www.cyclestreets.net run by two members of the Cambridge Cycling Campaign, has a UK bicycle journey planner using OpenCycleMaps. Cyclestreets has a "wiggliness" feature for routing new and hesitant cyclists on cyclepaths and roads likely to be carrying less traffic.

It's actually quite good - a bit like an AA Route Planner for bikes. You pop in a start and finish point and three cyclable routes appears as fastest route / balanced route / quietest route. The quietest route does sometimes use footpaths and fastest route does follow busy roads, so the balanced route is probably the best option. It isn't brilliant with post codes the best I got for home was S44 6 (actually Shuttlewood!). If you are starting in the centre of a town or village it will identify a point close to where you want to start.

I doubt there will ever be a perfect solution, but this is very useful - it provides a good basis for a route which can be tweaked where necessary. I will be using it to work out a few routes for Sunday rides.

One other thing I discovered - although you can't save routes, if you keep a note of the route number, you can search for it later (or just copy the URL).

Have a look and see what you think.

You can drag the pointer (start or finish) to the desired start / finish point if this doesn't come up in the search - so I can now start at home. My work commute is here as an example: http://www.cyclestreets.net/journey/113003/