Online Tools / Resources

[Slim]

I upgraded my Strava membership to the paid version because the route planning function became paid only, and I was using it quite a bit. But I ended up downgrading my subscription again because when they removed the planner from the freeloader membership, they actually made it a bit less usable, for me anyway. It has a few more features but it's slow.

This is the best online route planner I've found so far:

https://ridewithgps.com/route_planner

It's much more responsive than the Strava one, it has a really good selection of different maps and it even has Street View built in, which for me is massively useful. Saves me having to look for a road on Google Maps when planning a long route.

You can use it without signing up. If you do sign up for free membership, you can save your routes on the site - and/or download them in a variety of formats, so you can save them offline or upload them to a Garmin or similar.

You can upload routes to it as well, for editing or analysis - but you need paid membership for that. Pity, because I could have transferred my Strava routes to it en masse.

[Slim]

This has been a useful one for me:

http://www.masterlyinactivity.com/routemaster/

It's an online GPX track editor. Where I've found it handy is for repairing tracks that I've ruined by forgetting to hit 'resume' on the GPX device for a while, following a rest stop. So you end up with two consecutive track points, separated by a dead straight line a few miles long.

This tool allows you to add new, intermediate track points and drag them to the actual route you took (ie onto the road) to repair the track. It has a few other functions as well, for example you can remove a length of your track, and you can delete or move existing track points. Simple, but effective.

Simple to use, no account needed - just upload your track in GPX format and download when you've edited it.