Quiet roads, an hour of rain and a frame number
A cycle commute fails for unglamorous reasons: the obvious route is a dual carriageway, the rain arrives in the twenty minutes you are out, or the bike is gone when you come back to it. None of those need an expensive computer on the handlebars. A route planner set to cycling, an hourly rain radar and a photograph of the frame number cover almost all of it.
The route the map gives you is not the route you want
General navigation apps optimise for time, which on a bicycle means the main road. A cycling planner weights quiet streets, cycle paths and gradient instead, and will happily add four minutes to remove a roundabout. For a route you ride twice a day, that trade is worth taking every time.
| What you are choosing between | Ask for | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Fastest and busiest | General navigation | Traffic, junctions, stress |
| Quiet and slightly longer | A cycling planner | A few minutes each way |
| Flattest | A planner showing elevation | Distance, usually |
| Best surface | A planner with surface data | Some detours on gravel sections |
| Lit and populated after dark | Local knowledge plus a map | Nothing, and it matters in winter |
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What to install
komoot. The friendliest planner for building a cycling route on real paths, with surface and gradient shown before you commit. Offline regions beyond the first are paid.
Ride with GPS. Precise route building and clear turn by turn, and the easiest of these for following a route somebody else made.
Bikemap. A large library of routes uploaded by riders, which is the fastest way to find how locals actually get across a city.
Cyclers. Built for urban commuting specifically, with routing that weights quiet streets and a sensible dark mode for winter.
Bike Citizens. City focused with offline maps you buy per city, and navigation that suits a bike handlebar rather than a car dashboard.
Records the ride and, more usefully for a commuter, shows you honestly whether you are riding three times a week or claiming to.
Only relevant with the hardware, and then it is where the rides, the sleep and the training load all land.
Turns a recorded ride into a short flyover. Pointless and quite good at making you want to ride again.
Offline maps with cycle route overlays and contour lines, which is what you want when the phone signal dies under a bridge.
Lighter, free and open source, with cycle paths shown clearly. A good backup map that needs no account.
Useful for the last hundred metres and for the cycling layer, which shows where the dedicated paths actually are.
In the cities it covers, the best at combining a bike with the rest of the journey, including whether the train will take it.
Rain radar with short term movement. For the next sixty minutes this is far more useful than a daily forecast.
Hour by hour wind and temperature, which decides gloves and which direction the headwind will be on the way home.
Wind direction and gusts on a map. A twenty kilometre per hour headwind is a hill that lasts the whole commute.
Photograph the frame number, the serial and the whole bike, and keep them somewhere you can reach from another device. This is the five minutes that matters after a theft.
Frame number, lock keys, insurance policy and the shop's number in one note. Boring, and the thing you will want at the police station.
The hour before you leave
- Check the radar, not the daily summary A day forecast of thirty per cent rain tells you nothing about the twenty five minutes you are out. The radar does.
- Look at the wind direction both ways A tailwind out and a headwind home is a very different ride from the reverse, and it decides what you wear.
- Decide the wet weather plan before it rains Mudguards and a jacket, or the bus and the bike left at work. Deciding while standing in a downpour produces worse answers.
- Charge the lights when you charge the phone Winter commutes end in the dark, and a dead light is the reason people take the main road home.
- Leave five minutes earlier in the wet Braking distances and other people's driving both get worse. The five minutes is the cheapest safety equipment there is.
Getting the bike back
Recovery depends almost entirely on having the frame number, which is stamped on the frame, usually under the bottom bracket. Without it a bike cannot be identified when it turns up; with it, a police report and a marketplace search occasionally work. Register the number with a national bike register if one exists where you live, photograph it, and keep the receipt with the photographs.
- Photographing the frame number and the bike
- Registering it wherever your country registers bikes
- Checking what your insurance covers away from home
- Two locks of different types, used together
- Relying on a tracker alone to get it back
- A cable lock anywhere in a city
- Leaving the receipt in a drawer only
- Assuming a quiet street is a safe one
Plan the route as a cyclist, check the radar for the next hour rather than the day, and photograph the frame number tonight.
Frequently asked questions
Which planner gives the quietest route?
The dedicated cycling planners all weight quiet roads and paths, and they differ mostly by how good the local data is. Try two on the same commute and ride the one whose route you prefer.
Do I need a bike computer?
No. A phone mounted where you can see it does everything a commuter needs. A dedicated computer earns its place on long rides, in rain, and when you want the battery kept separate.
How accurate is rain radar?
For the next hour it is genuinely good, because it is showing where rain already is and where it is heading. Beyond a few hours it becomes an ordinary forecast.
Will an app stop my bike being stolen?
No. Locks and where you leave it decide that. The phone's job is the frame number, the photographs and the paperwork that make recovery and a claim possible.
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