There’s a particular kind of showing off that only cyclists get to do: finish a ride, open the map, and have it spell something. A word. A heart. A rough bicycle. People have been doing it for years by squinting at street maps and planning every turn by hand, which is a lovely way to spend an evening and a miserable way to spend three.
So we built Route Art. Type a word, and it finds a bike route that draws it along the actual streets near you. It starts working as you type — no button to hunt for.
What it does
Type HELLO. While you’re still typing, the shape appears on the map as a dashed outline — that’s the target. A moment after you stop, the route appears underneath it, following real roads and cycleways.
Then it does something we’re rather pleased with: if the result is mediocre, it quietly goes looking for somewhere better nearby and swaps to it if it wins. You don’t have to ask.
You can also drop in a drawing. SVG works best because it keeps the real lines of the artwork. A PNG or JPG works too — it gets traced automatically.
When you’re happy, Watch it draw replays the route being ridden, stroke by stroke, so you can see the word appear the way it will on your ride log. Then download the GPX and go.
Why this is harder than it looks
Our first attempt handed the shape to a general-purpose routing engine, the same kind that gives you directions to the shops. It came back as unreadable blocks.
The reason is simple once you see it. A normal router optimises for travel: it wants the fastest sensible way from A to B, so it takes the main road and the fewest turns. Between two points on a grid there are many equally quick paths, and “which one looks like the letter H” is not among the things it cares about.
So the router had to change. Route Art runs on our own map of the streets, with a cost that cares about the shape — every road is priced by how far it strays from the line you’re trying to draw, inside a narrow corridor around it. A road that runs along your stroke is cheap. One that leaves it is expensive. The idea comes from a 2019 paper by Waschk and Krüger on automatic route planning for GPS art, which identified exactly this failure in off-the-shelf routing.
One thing we learned the hard way: cycleways alone can’t do it. Inner Sydney’s cycling network is dense, but it breaks into hundreds of disconnected pieces — you can’t draw a continuous letter across fragments. So the roads provide the connectivity, and the cycle paths are a preference the route leans toward where it can.
The score is honest, sometimes brutally
Every result gets a trace score, and getting that number to agree with your eyes took more work than the routing did.
Our first version asked one question: how close is the route to the shape? It gave 84 out of 100 to output that plainly read as nothing. A route can zigzag back and forth along your line, hug one end of a letter and ignore the rest, and still score beautifully on closeness alone.
So the score now asks three things: did the route stay on the shape, did it actually go everywhere the shape went, and how much further did it travel than the shape is long? A route two and a half times longer than the drawing is a scribble however closely it clings.
You’ll see a plain-English verdict under the number — reads clearly, readable but loose, or doesn’t read as the shape. We’d rather tell you it didn’t work than hand you a confident-looking number.
What actually makes a good one
We tested this properly rather than guessing, and some of the results surprised us.
Where you put it matters more than anything else. The same word a few blocks away can score twenty points differently. That’s why Find me a better spot is the button worth pressing — it searches the streets around you and always considers where you already are, so it can only improve things. Nothing you set by hand comes close.
Size mostly prevents disasters rather than creating triumphs. More room per letter helps, but what it really does is stop the bad outcomes: cramped shapes sometimes fail badly, roomy ones don’t. The tool sizes your text for you, so you can leave it alone.
Two things we were sure would help, didn’t. We tried squaring off the letters into straight-line forms to suit street grids — no measurable difference across sixteen tests. We tried making letters wider and shorter — also nothing. The variation between one street and the next is bigger than either effect, which is a good lesson in not trusting a single nice-looking result.
Be honest with yourself about the distance
Here’s the part nobody mentions. A word big enough to read is a serious ride.
Letters need room to be legible, and room means kilometres. A five-letter word across a city is closer to an event than an afternoon — the tool will happily hand you fifty kilometres and a four-hour estimate. It shows you the distance and the time before you commit, which as far as we can tell none of the other GPS-art tools bother to do.
Some of that we’ve clawed back. The route now works out the best order to ride the strokes in, and which direction to ride each one, which cut the wasted travel between letters by nearly 40% on a test word — around 15% off the whole ride, for no loss of artwork. But the rest is simple geometry: legibility costs distance.
Start with something short. HI is a perfectly respectable first attempt.
Try it
Route Art is live now — free, no signup, bicycle routes, and it runs in your browser as you type.
A few things worth knowing:
- Type something short first. Two or three letters will show you what your local streets can do before you commit to a phrase.
- Press Find me a better spot. It’s the single biggest improvement available and it can’t make things worse.
- Check the distance before you get excited. Then check it again.
- Download the GPX and load it onto your computer or phone, same as any other route.
If you make a good one, we’d love to see it. Tag us @partyonbici — and if your city’s streets refuse to cooperate, that’s not you, that’s the street grid, and we’ve all been there.