Route planning guide - devemux86/cruiser GitHub Wiki

Whether you're going from A-to-B or riding a multi-stop tour, it's important to know the basics of planning an efficient route.

Your route may just consist of Start+End points, or include a number of Shaping Points (SP) and Via Points (VP).

On the Routing settings page, you can set a number of "avoidances" and other preferences for your route.

Waypoint types

• A Shaping Point is a route-shaping marker to tell Cruiser (and the used routing engine) to take us through this point without marking a specific location.

Shaping points help determine the shape of the calculated track. In navigation, they are target points for the auto recalculation. In navigation, shaping points are NOT announced. Via points are used almost identically with one extra. In navigation, via points ARE announced.

Example: An example use would be a long journey that starts with some motorway miles but you wish to ride the last part on some specific scenic roads. By placing some SPs on the motorway at the beginning you could override the default routing profile (e.g. "extra curvy"), which then guides you through the fun part of your trip.

• A Via Point performs the same function as a SP in the first place, while it additionally marks a location that you definitely want to reach (e.g. a biker meeting point to meet other riders). This means Cruiser treats VP's like a "stop" and calculates and shows the distance and time from your current location to a VP. In navigation, they are target points for the auto recalculation.

Example: A VP makes a good marker on a long journey like in the first example, that signals the exit of the motorway: it is a useful countdown until you get on a more fun road. You can give it also a custom name (details further down this page).

• Whether a VP or SP must be necessarily passed during navigation can be adapted with the "Strict route following" option in Settings > Navigation.

• If you have not passed a non strict point (e.g. because of a detour) and continue to follow the route, Cruiser will route you to the next SP or VP ahead.

• If you have not passed a strict point (e.g. because of a detour), Cruiser will try to navigate you back to that SP or VP as long as you don't skip it manually. Only after skipping a strict point Cruiser will route you to the next SP or VP ahead.

Waypoints list

This is the route in list form showing each point along the route. The list can be re-ordered by dragging an item up/down, swiped left to remove or toggled between a Shaping Point or Via Point.

In this example, we have a simple route with a Shaping Point - designed to take us along a particular road against what the automatic routing may have decided:

We can tap the Shaping Point and it becomes a Via Point:

Further information about the Via Point's position in the route is also offered: It's 11.2mi (11min) into the route with 7.4mi and 9min remaining. During navigation, Cruiser can display the distance+time to the next Via Point.

Tapping the 3 dots on the item will open the menu allowing you to perform a number of actions, including the ability to rename the point to a memorable name:

Both Shaping+Via Points, when imported from an external GPX file, retain the names - here's an example from Garmin's BaseCamp software:

From this list, we have a few Via Points with a name/title that make sense, plus we can see that our 1st fuel-stop is approx 50mi 1hr26 into the journey.