Google Maps for motorcycle riding: why it picks the wrong roads

Google Maps is an extraordinary piece of engineering. It knows about the roadworks that started this morning. It knows the café shuts at three. For getting somewhere, nothing beats it.

For riding a motorcycle, it is the wrong tool, and it is worth understanding exactly why — because the reason is structural, not a missing feature that might arrive next year.

MotoRidez plans scenic, curvy or gravel routes for a motorcycle, a car or a 4WD. Pick your road type, and the routing follows.

It is optimising for the wrong thing

Every routing engine assigns a cost to each stretch of road and finds the cheapest path. Google Maps costs roads primarily by time. That single choice produces everything riders complain about:

• Motorways and dual carriageways are cheap in time, so you get them.
• A tight, beautiful, 40 km/h mountain road is expensive in time, so it is avoided.
• Elevation is a time penalty rather than a feature.
• A road with a hundred bends looks, to the cost function, like a mistake.

A curvy motorcycle router changes the cost function: bends become cheap, motorways become expensive, small paved roads with elevation get rewarded. Same algorithm, inverted values. That is the whole difference, and it is why a “motorcycle mode” toggle in a time-optimising app would not fix it — the entire model is pointed the other way.

The specific things that go wrong

It has no idea what you are riding on. Google Maps has limited surface awareness for two-wheelers. Riders regularly report being sent down gravel roads, farm tracks and, in rural Australia, things that stop being a road entirely. On a road bike with sports tyres in the wet, that is not an inconvenience. If you deliberately want gravel, that is a decision you should make on purpose, not one an app makes for you.

It cannot do a round trip. “Give me a nice three-hour loop that ends where it started” is the most common motorcycle request there is, and Google Maps has no answer for it. You end up picking an arbitrary distant town and hoping.

Multi-stop planning runs out fast. A good day ride has a coffee stop, a lookout, a fuel stop and a lunch stop, in a specific order, chosen because of where they sit on the road. Google Maps limits a route to about ten stops including the start and end, which a multi-day trip uses up quickly, and it does not know which order makes a better ride.

There is no export. You cannot get a GPX out. Your route lives in Google’s app and nowhere else, which means you cannot ride it on a sat nav or share it with a mate on a different app. GPX portability is what makes a route yours.

“Avoid highways” is not the fix. The setting removes the motorway, but the route it builds is still the quickest one on what is left. You swap a fast dual carriageway for a straight main road, not for the twisty back road you had in mind. There is no scenic or curvy option to switch on instead.

It reroutes you to save four minutes. Mid-ride, having found congestion, it will happily send you off the good road onto a bypass. Time saved, ride ruined.

What about Waze?

Waze is Google Maps with a stronger community layer and even more aggressive time optimisation. It is excellent for commuting and enormously enthusiastic about putting you on the fastest road, which for a weekend ride is precisely the failure mode described above. The hazard reports are genuinely useful — but they are car hazards on car routes, not “gravel on the exit of a left-hander” on a mountain road.

What good looks like instead

A router built for motorcycles gives you:

• Curviness as a first-class input. Ask for more bends and get more bends, not a longer motorway.
• Round trips. Two hours, from here, back to here, mostly good roads.
• Surface awareness. Paved by default, gravel only if you asked, with the gravel proportion shown before you commit.
• Real waypoints. Enough stops for a full day, in the order you chose, with the route built around your fuel stop rather than interrupted by it.
• GPX export. The route belongs to you.
• Prompts timed for a helmet. Voice guidance that arrives early enough to act on at riding speed, not car-timed instructions that land at the apex.

Our guide to planning a curvy route walks through the workflow if you have only ever used a car nav, and our round-up of the best free motorcycle GPS apps compares the apps that actually do all of this. If you drive rather than ride, the same problem applies, and a scenic route planner fixes it for any vehicle.

Where Google Maps still belongs on your bars

Not everything is a Sunday ride:

• Getting from home to the meeting point on a Saturday morning.
• Finding fuel, food or a chemist in an unfamiliar town.
• Checking whether the pass is closed.
• Any journey where arriving is genuinely the point.

Keep it. Just stop asking it to design your weekend, because it does not know what a good road is — it only knows what a fast one is.

The one-line version

Google Maps answers how do I get there quickest. A motorcycle router answers what is the best way round. Those are different questions, and only one of them is why you bought a motorcycle.