Know the route
before you run it.
Draw a route, or ask for a loop, and RunMapApp shows what’s on it at the hour you go: where the shade falls, the hills, the wind, the sun in your eyes, and where you can cross and run off the road. For running, walking, hiking and riding.
6:00 pm
Sun 35° above the west
Everything on the route, measured. Nothing you didn’t ask for.
No feed, no kudos, no training plan. The map, the ground truth, and what you know about your own streets. Every one of these is worked out for the route you drew, at the time you set.
Shade at the hour you go
Tree cover, tree height and the sun’s position for your date and time, so each stretch of the line is coloured by the shade actually on it. Move the time and watch the shadows swing across the road.
Hills you can trust
Climb and descent from bare-ground survey data where it exists (laser-scanned in England, USGS in the US), so a row of tall trees never shows up as a hill.
Wind, with shelter
The forecast for when you’re out, softened where trees and buildings break it, and told as a pace: “5:30/km runs like 5:41/km” into the headwind. It says which way round to run a loop, and only when it really matters.
The sun in your eyes
A gold edge on the stretches where you’ll be running straight into a low sun with nothing in the way, and the sun drawn at the edge of the map so you can see where it is.
Crossings and sidewalks
Where you can get across, with the signalised crossings picked out, and where there’s a sidewalk, a path or a greenway, including the streets surveyed and found to have none.
Bike lanes, for rides
Switch to a ride and the route follows cycling roads, pace becomes speed, and the map shows bike lanes by how protected they are, with busy roads that leave no room for a bike called out.
The loop generator
Ask for a loop. Choose what matters.
Pick a length and a start, and the generator offers three different loops, ranked by what you care about most: Shadiest, Safest (sidewalks, marked crossings, quiet streets), Roundest, or a balance of all of them.
Loops that know your town
Name places it must pass, or paint the parts of town you like and the ones you’d rather avoid. Choose the shape: a loop, a lollipop, an out and back, or a figure eight through your start. Where there’s no room for a loop, on an island or a spit of land, it says so and offers an out and back instead.
On long runs it keeps you off busy roads where it can, and says what it did: Kept off 1.6 mi of Market Street (+0.8 mi). Each card names any busy road that’s left, and how many times the loop crosses one with no crosswalk.
Choose a loop and its hills, shade and wind fill the panel under the map before you take it. Don’t like one? “Not this one” takes it away and finds another, keeping the ones you liked. Like most of one? Change a stretch on its card swaps just the part you don’t, right there in the list.
Drawing
Build it the way you think about it.
Click the map and the line follows real roads, sidewalks and paths. Then fix it a stretch at a time, instead of fighting the router one point at a time.
Replace a stretch, draw in pieces
Replace stretch: click where the part you don’t like starts and where it ends, and the app offers up to three other ways between those two points, each saying what it changes: a little longer, off the busy road, across at a crosswalk. Nothing outside the stretch moves.
Draw in pieces: draw the bits you want, anywhere and in any order (the greenway, the park loop, the riverwalk) and join them. It works out the order and the quietest ways between them.
Dragging the line moves only a short stretch around where you dragged, so a small change stays small, and the part that will move lights up while you drag. Drop markers on anything worth remembering: the water fountain, the bad kerb, the dog that always gets out.
The stuff runners actually check
Crossings, sidewalks and paths — not just the road line.
Anyone can draw a line down a street. The questions when you’re planning are whether you can get across it, and whether there’s anywhere to run that isn’t the road. Both are map layers you can switch on while you draw.
Where you can actually cross
Crossings show up as icons at street level, and the ones with a traffic signal are drawn green, so the safer place to get over a four-lane road is visible without clicking anything. Hover any of them for the specific type: marked, unmarked, signalised, or with a pedestrian island.
OpenStreetMap is the baseline everywhere. In places across six countries, the city’s own crossing inventory takes over as ground truth: field-verified, with a real signal attribute rather than an inferred tag. The coverage map shows where.
Somewhere to run that isn’t the road
One switch, four answers. A teal line is a confirmed sidewalk. A red-orange one means confirmed absent: the more useful half, since it’s the difference between a street nobody has mapped and a street somebody checked and found nothing on.
Violet and magenta are the good stuff: traffic-free foot paths, and shared-use greenways and bikeways. Named ones say their name when you hover, because “River to Sea Bikeway” tells a local far more than “shared-use path” does.
Absence is only claimed where a source can back it: a city’s street-by-street survey can say “missing” with confidence; a layer that only records the sidewalks it can see never draws red, because silence there isn’t evidence.
Take it with you
Onto your watch, or to a friend
Run this route asks once what you run with (Garmin, COROS, Suunto, Wahoo, Apple Watch with a route app, Strava, Komoot, or just your phone) and shows the quickest way to get it there. On a phone the file goes straight to the watch’s app.
Share a route with a link, with its start hidden if it begins at your door. Whoever opens it sees the shaded line, the hills and the wind, and can put it on their own watch without an account. Routes you make public show in the gallery for everyone signed in.
Method
The shade number isn’t a vibe.
Every colour on that line traces back to a published dataset and a solved sun position. A shade estimate you can’t check is just a colour, so here is the whole chain.
Tree cover
How much of each patch of ground is under canopy. A city’s own survey where one exists, often tree by tree; national and global land cover everywhere else.
Tree and building height
How tall that canopy stands, at roughly a metre, and building footprints and heights where we’ve imported them. Height sets how far a shadow reaches.
Sun position
Altitude and compass bearing for your date, hour and place, on your own clock — solved, not looked up in a table.
Shade on the road
Shadows cast across the road you’re on, read out per stretch and as a share of the whole route, and drawn as a strip under the hills.
Coverage & limits
What it doesn’t know.
An estimate that hides its own edges isn’t trustworthy — it’s just confident. We’d rather tell you where the model runs out than have you find out at mile three.
This is the same list that sits in our own engineering notes. More in the FAQ →
- Buildings cast shadows only where we’ve imported them.49 cities and counties so far — the coverage map has the list. Everywhere else buildings cast no shadow in the model, which is the biggest source of error in any other downtown.
- Tree cover is coarsest where nobody has surveyed it.With no local survey the global layer calls each 10 m cell tree or not-tree — a real figure anywhere, just blunter about partial cover. Where a city has surveyed its trees, it is far sharper.
- It answers by neighbourhood, not by branch.Good for “is this stretch tree-lined”. Not for whether one particular tree shades one particular kerb.
- Local crossing and sidewalk data is patchy by definition.It exists where a city has published an inventory and nowhere else, so the answer changes as you cross a city line. Everywhere without one runs on OpenStreetMap alone, which is thinner, especially for sidewalks.
- Wind is a forecast.The shelter from trees and buildings is worked out from their heights, not measured on the street, and it only ever takes wind away.
- How safe a road feels isn’t in any dataset.We show what is measured, like a confirmed missing sidewalk or a busy road crossed with no crosswalk, and you can mark the rest with a “Hazard / watch out” marker.
Find the better way round.
Draw tomorrow’s route in about a minute, or ask for a loop, and see the shade, hills and wind on it before you’re out there. Free while we’re in beta.