Type a start and a destination and get a route that follows the signed cycle routes of Belgium, with the knooppunten (junction numbers) to ride, a height profile, round trips and a GPX file. Install it on your phone and it opens without a connection.
The route is calculated by a free routing service and the junction numbers come from OpenStreetMap. Your saved routes stay in your browser.
Type a town, street or place in From and To and pick a suggestion, or tap the map and choose Start here. Add stops on the way with Add a stop. Belgium only.
Cycle routes prefers signed routes and cycle paths. Safest stays on quiet roads. Fastest takes the quickest paved way. Set your pace to get a time that fits you.
The line is green on signed routes, blue on cycle paths and orange on other roads. Under it is the list of knooppunten: ride from sign to sign, as on the road.
Under Round trip choose a start, a distance from 10 to 150 km and a direction. You get up to three loops that end where they began, each with its real length.
Save a GPX file for your bike computer, copy a share link, print the numbers or keep the route under Saved. Install the app to open it without a connection.
Cycling in Belgium is easiest when you follow the numbers. Flanders and large parts of Wallonia have a network of signed cycle routes in which every junction has a number, the knooppunten. You do not read a map: you pick a list of numbers, such as 12, 45, 7, 33, and ride from one sign to the next. This page plans such a ride. You give a start and a destination, and it draws a cycle route between them, then looks up the junction numbers that lie on that line and lists them in order, with the way to turn at each one. The list is what you take along, on a screen, on paper or in a GPX file, and the map helps you see where you are going.
It is a planner for the ride, and it is not turn-by-turn navigation. It has no account, no ads and no tracking of the places you search. Routes are saved in your browser, or in a file, or as a link. The app can be installed on a phone, and then the saved routes and the junction numbers you downloaded keep working in a place with no coverage.
The knooppunten on your route, in order, with the turn and the distance between them.
The line prefers signed cycle routes and cycle paths, and shows how much of it really is.
Choose a start, 10 to 150 km and a direction, and get up to three loops.
A height profile, the climb, and the share of cobbles and unpaved track.
GPX with the junctions as waypoints, a share link, a print sheet and a backup file.
Install it, download the junction data of Belgium once, and plan without a connection.
The junction network, called fietsknooppuntennetwerk in Dutch, began in Flanders and spread. At each junction there is a signpost with the numbers of the neighbouring junctions and an arrow, and on the way between them small green signs repeat the next number. The networks are local: the numbers belong to a region, and the same number is used again in another one. That is why the page lists the numbers in order rather than as a loose set, and why it is the order that matters. Alongside the junction network there are routes of a longer reach, such as the national and regional routes, and local circuits. The line on the map is coloured green wherever one of these routes is signed, so you can see at a glance where the route is on the network and where it is not.
Wallonia and Brussels have fewer numbered junctions than Flanders. A route there may follow RAVeL paths and signed circuits with no numbers at all, and the page then says that no numbered junctions were found instead of showing an empty list. In a city centre the same can happen, because the network avoids the busiest streets and the fastest way through town does not follow it.
The line is calculated by BRouter, a free and open source bike router that works on OpenStreetMap data. Its trekking profile adds a cost to busy roads and takes off a cost for roads that belong to a cycle route, so with the type set to Cycle routes it tends to stay on signed routes and cycle paths even when that is a little longer. Safest pushes harder towards quiet roads and separate tracks. Fastest uses a profile meant for a road bike, which cares more about speed and paved surface than about the network. Which one is right depends on the ride: a relaxed day out follows the network, a commute follows the fast profile.
The page is honest about what the line is. It is the output of a general bike router that likes cycle routes, and it is not a copy of an official route planner, so it can differ from a route you would draw by hand along the network. Next to the line is a bar that says how many percent of the distance runs on signed routes, on separate cycle paths and on other roads, so you can judge for yourself. If the cycle router cannot be reached, a second router is used and the page says so, because that one knows nothing about the network.
After the line is drawn the page loads the junction nodes from OpenStreetMap for the area around it and matches them to the route. A junction counts when the route passes within a few metres of it. The numbers are put in the order of the ride, a number that appears twice in a row is merged, and the turn at each junction is worked out from the direction you arrive and the direction you leave: straight on, slightly left or right, a turn, or a sharp turn. Each row also gives the distance from the previous junction and from the start, so that you know when to look for the next sign. Click a row to see the junction on the map.
The numbers come from volunteers who map the signs, and signs change. A junction may have been renumbered, a section may be closed for roadworks, and a new one may not be mapped yet. Always check the sign on the road, and treat the list as a good plan, and not as a promise. If part of the data could not be loaded, which can happen when the free map data server is busy, the page says so and offers to try again.
For a ride that ends where it begins, open Round trip, choose the start, the distance and the direction, and press the button. The page puts two points around the start so that the route runs through them in a rough triangle, asks the router for the way through, looks at how long the result is, moves the points to correct for the difference and asks once more. It does this for three directions, and it keeps the loops that come closest to your distance and that do not simply ride the same road back. The real length is shown for every loop, because a cycle route follows roads and never matches the target exactly. The share of the loop that runs over the same ground twice is shown too. A start close to the coast or the border gives fewer loops, as some directions point at the sea or at another country.
Belgium is flat in the north and hilly in the south, and the height profile shows which one you are in for. It is drawn from the elevation of the route, and the climb is added up with a small tolerance so that noise in the data is not counted as hills. Hover over the profile to follow the position on the map. The surface comes from OpenStreetMap too. Paved, cobbles (kasseien) and unpaved track are shown as percentages, and a warning appears when a large part of the route is cobbled or unpaved, as that matters more on a road bike than any hill. The time is a plain estimate from the distance, the climb and the pace you chose. It is for planning, and does not include stops.
The GPX file holds the line and every junction as a waypoint with its number, so a bike computer or an app on the phone can show the numbers on the route. The share link holds only the places and the options, and anyone who opens it gets the same route calculated again. Printing builds a sheet with a plain sketch of the route, the junction numbers in order in large type, and the step-by-step list, which is handy for a handlebar bag. Saved routes are kept in this browser together with their junction numbers, and Save all writes them to one backup file that can be opened again here. Opening a GPX file, from this page or from elsewhere, draws the track and looks up the junction numbers along it.
The page is a web app. In Chrome, Edge and on Android it can be installed from the address bar or the menu, and on an iPhone with Add to Home Screen. Installed, it opens in its own window and starts without a connection. The tab Map & app has a button that downloads the junction data of the whole country, a few megabytes in about a hundred and fifty pieces, so that the numbers of any route can be looked up with no connection. Without that download the pieces along each route you plan are saved by themselves. Map pictures that you have looked at are kept for a while too. Planning a new route does need a connection, because the router runs on a server.
There is no account and no server of mine that receives your places. The browser contacts the services that do the work, and each one sees only what it needs. The page itself, the map library and the app files come from this site. The font comes from Google Fonts and the page statistics from SimpleAnalytics, which uses no cookies. When you type in a place field, the text is sent to the address search of Komoot (Photon) and, if that finds nothing, to Nominatim of OpenStreetMap. When you tap the map or use your location as the start, the coordinates are sent to the same services to find a name for the spot. Your location is read only when you press the location button, and it stays in your browser except for that name lookup. The coordinates of your start, stops and destination go to BRouter (brouter.de) to calculate the route, and to the backup router at routing.openstreetmap.de if that is down. The junction data is requested from the Overpass servers (overpass-api.de, with overpass.private.coffee and overpass.kumi.systems as backups) as boxes of map area, with no personal data. Map tiles come from Carto, OpenStreetMap, CyclOSM and, if you switch the cycle routes layer on, from Waymarked Trails, and those servers see your address and the part of the map you look at.
In your browser the page stores your settings and the places in the form under the key fietsroute-ui, your saved routes under fietsroute-saved, and the light or dark choice under jb-theme. The junction data lives in a database called fietsroute in IndexedDB, and the app files and the map pictures you looked at in the cache storage of the browser, under the names fr-shell-v1 and fr-tiles-v1. The tab Map & app can remove the saved junction data and the map pictures, and clearing the site data of your browser removes everything.
Start, stops and destination must be in Belgium, and a route may cross the border if that is the way the router goes. Very long routes take longer to calculate. The planner does not know about roadworks, closed bridges or a ferry that is not running. It has no live position and gives no voice directions, so for the ride itself use the GPX file in a navigation app, or the printed list, and keep the sign in view. If you find a wrong junction number, the fix belongs in OpenStreetMap, and from there it reaches this page.
This page plans the ride. For the weather and a few other things around it, there are more tools in the full list.