Combined Shape Bike IQ

Map & Route Settings

Map & Route Settings control what you see on the ride map — from cycling infrastructure overlays and visual style to climb detection and route planning tools.

Map and route settings — bike lanes, map style, and climb detection

Bike Lanes & Paths Overlay

The Bike Lanes & Paths overlay draws cycling infrastructure on your map using data from OpenStreetMap. Dedicated bike lanes, shared paths, cycle tracks, and bike-friendly roads are highlighted so you can identify safe routes at a glance.

The overlay data is downloadable, so it works offline once you have fetched the tiles for your area. This is useful for riding in areas with spotty cell coverage where you still want to see where bike infrastructure exists.

Map Style Toggles

Fine-tune what appears on the map by toggling individual layers on or off:

  • Buildings — 3D building footprints. Helpful for urban navigation, but adds visual clutter on rural rides.
  • Road Labels — street and road names on the map. Essential if you navigate by street name, unnecessary if you follow the route line exclusively.
  • POIs — points of interest like shops, restaurants, and parks. Useful for finding a coffee stop mid-ride. Turn off for a cleaner map.
  • Contour Lines — topographic contour lines showing elevation changes. Valuable for hilly terrain where you want to see the grade profile of the landscape around you.
  • 3D Objects — landmarks and notable structures rendered in 3D. Adds context in cities but can slow map rendering on older devices.

Disabling layers you do not need reduces visual noise and can improve map rendering performance. Start with everything on and remove what distracts you.

Climb Detection

Bike IQ can detect climbs on your route and display them as you approach and ride through them. The climb detection settings let you control this behavior:

  • Enable/Disable — turn climb detection on or off entirely.
  • Minimum Category — set the smallest climb category that triggers detection, from Cat 4+ (short, moderate climbs) through HC (hors catégorie, the hardest climbs). If you only care about major climbs, set this to Cat 2 or higher to filter out small rollers.
  • Elevation Gain Threshold — the minimum vertical gain a climb must have to be detected. Raising this filters out short, steep ramps that technically qualify as climbs but are over in seconds.
  • Grade Threshold — the minimum average grade for a section to count as a climb. Higher values mean only steep climbs are flagged.
  • Rolling Hills — when enabled, the detector identifies rolling terrain with repeated short climbs as a single sustained effort. Disable this if you prefer each individual rise to be tracked separately.

Route Elevation Profile

When following a route, Bike IQ displays an elevation profile showing the terrain ahead. The profile highlights upcoming climbs and descents so you can pace your effort. Your current position is marked on the profile, giving you a sense of how far into a climb you are and how much remains.

Auto-Switch to Climb Camera

When Auto-Switch to Climb Camera is enabled, the map automatically zooms in and tilts to a climb-focused view as you enter a detected climb. This gives you a closer look at the gradient and the road ahead. When the climb ends, the camera returns to your normal ride view.

This is useful on unfamiliar routes where you want to see the climb's shape and steepness in real time. On routes you know well, you may prefer to disable it and keep a consistent map perspective throughout.

Route Duration Estimation

Bike IQ estimates how long a route will take based on your average power output. Unlike simple speed-based estimates, power-based duration accounts for elevation changes — the estimate slows down on climbs and speeds up on descents proportionally to the effort required.

This gives more realistic ETAs for hilly routes. A flat 50 km route and a mountainous 50 km route with the same distance produce very different time estimates because the climbing adds significant time that a flat-speed average would miss.

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