Info

Trailmap is a service for cyclists, trail runners and outdoor people who are after new roads, trails and scenery for their outings. Trailmap offers a wide selection of maps, the means to create your own routes, and navigation either on your phone or on a sports computer.

Trailmap draws on many different map data sources, but the most important one is OpenStreetMap community map data ("OSM"). Trailmap was originally created in 2018 to support active OSM trail mapping, and supporting the OSM mapping community is still a central part of Trailmap's goals.

Who is Trailmap especially designed for?

The people who get the most out of the service are those who head out into the terrain often and want variety in their trails, scenery and terrain to keep the sport exciting. Some appreciate technical trails, some steep descents that get the pulse going, and others idyllic lakeside trails. Someone else wants to plan a long trail run with as much flowing, runnable trail as possible. Gravel cyclists, in turn, want to plan routes with the right dose of tarmac, gravel, small forest roads and easy trails.

Trailmap is designed for these needs — to make the frequently repeated job of planning routes easier. If, on the other hand, you're travelling somewhere further afield and have time for one ride you want to get everything out of, it's usually better to fall back on a ready-made route someone else has planned, ideally one with photos or video to help you judge it. Even then you can use Trailmap to edit an existing track or combine several different tracks.

There's no shortage of map apps — what sets Trailmap apart from the others?

There are countless different map apps, but I have yet to come across one that meets the need Trailmap was created for: a wide selection of different maps and a special "trail map" with the most comprehensive selection of trails, with both the technicality of the trails and the shape of the terrain clearly shown on the map to make choosing trails easier when planning, plus automatic trail-following routing to help you draw the route.

Many people use apps based on the National Land Survey's (NLS) topographic map for getting around on roads and trails. The NLS map data is excellent in many respects, but it has one major shortcoming: information about trails is not updated systematically, and in many places the information on the map is decades old and therefore above all incomplete, but also inaccurate. It was precisely to solve this problem that the mountain bikers' OSM trail mapping community formed in 2013, later expanding to cover enthusiasts of many different sports around Finland. Read more a bit further down.

There are many different needs, though, so it's good that there are various map apps with slightly different features and strengths available. Trailmap's MTB trail maps can also be used in some smartphone apps.

How reliable is the "trail map"?

Trailmap's core maps, "MTB" and "3D MTB" — the "trail maps" — are based mainly on the OSM community map, supported by the National Land Survey's map data. Over the last not quite 10 years, enthusiasts have mapped and classified over 23,000 km of trails into OSM! Thanks to this volunteer work, OSM contains a staggering number of trails you won't find on the NLS topographic map, and these trails are usually classified from the point of view of riding them on a mountain bike ("MTB") — the classification describes in practice how "technical" a trail is, i.e. whether and to what extent it has roots, rocks, rock steps, holes and similar challenges. The easiest trail is smooth "pine-needle trail", and the hardest are rocks and root beds. Despite the "MTB" name, the trail classification serves every sport where you care about how smoothly you can move along the trail.

No map can promise absolute accuracy about how up to date trails are: whether they're rideable, or even whether they exist. That's why it's always good to think about a few backup options when planning a route, in case some trail turns out not to be passable, or not as pleasant to travel as you expected when planning.

What does the service or its maps cost?

Trailmap is from enthusiasts to enthusiasts, and its core features are free. It was created by mountain bikers in the Tampere region as part of a wider project to map every trail in the area that was even remotely rideable. The end result is an exceptionally comprehensive and accurate description of the area's magnificently extensive trail network, and the trails are recorded in the OpenStreetMap database for everyone to use.

Trailmap itself was developed to make it easier to use the OpenStreetMap database for planning outings, since OpenStreetMap's normal maps weren't particularly usable for it as they were.

Trailmap also has a paid add-on package, the Plus package, which gives you access to all of the service's features. By paying, you also support the development and upkeep of the service — the first takes a lot of time, and the second a lot of money for renting what is by now a fairly substantial amount of server capacity.

Are ready-made routes available?

Trailmap is built above all for planning your own routes. You can of course use ready-made routes or routes shared by others as a starting point and plan your own route on top of that. Or you can look at an existing route to get a picture of what kind of terrain and trails it runs on. At the moment Trailmap doesn't directly offer a collection of ready-made routes, but users can share routes they've planned in Trailmap with each other through various channels, and new features for sharing and making use of routes are being developed all the time.

Note that routes shared via Trailmap are not official routes in any sense. In other words, the user is always responsible for themselves when travelling along these routes, including for complying with everyman's rights.

New routes sound nice, but I don't dare set off because I'm not good at navigating...

Basic orienteering skills are useful when you head into the forest, into terrain and onto trails you don't already know. At the very least a superficial ability to read a map. Traditional orienteering with a paper map and compass is, however, a much harder skill to learn than what's needed with the modern aids usually used with Trailmap: a phone or a running watch / bike computer with positioning, a digital map and a track requires essentially the same skills as using Google Maps or a car navigator — you need to be able to follow the track drawn on the map using the "location dot" that shows your own position and direction of travel.

Modern running watches and bike computers make it astonishingly easy to navigate trails in terrain you don't already know. It's good to bring along a bit of a sense of adventure, of course, but after a little practice, running briskly on trails without constantly stopping to navigate is fairly easy, as is riding — just easing off a bit at every junction. On Garmin's newest running watches, for example, you can have a trail map in the background with your planned track on top of it, and follow it smoothly even at speed.