Twisty road layer
Turn this on and the roads that bend get painted over the map in yellow, orange and red. It’s for the question every rider asks looking at an unfamiliar area: which of these is worth the detour?
Three shades, drawn on top of whatever the map is already showing. Red is the good stuff.
The button that switches it on is the fourth down the right-hand side — a squiggle. Its ring turns orange while the layer is on, and shows an orange spinner while it loads.
What the colours mean
Every road in your downloaded region carries a bendiness score. The layer paints it in one of three bands:
- Yellow — moderate. Enough corners to be more interesting than a straight run.
- Orange — curvy. A proper ride.
- Red — very twisty. The top of the scale.
Straight roads aren’t drawn at all. Anything below the moderate threshold was never stored in the first place, so an empty patch of map means there’s nothing there worth colouring — not that the data is missing.
A red line tells you the road bends a lot. It says nothing about whether it’s sealed, in good repair, or open. Dirt tracks and goat trails score just as high as a well-surfaced mountain pass.
Using it
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Tap the squiggle button on the right
The lines appear over the area you’re currently looking at.
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Pan and zoom to explore
Each time the map settles, the layer redraws for the new view. Zoomed out over a big area you’ll hit a cap of 2000 segments per region, so the very worst of the sprawl gets trimmed — zoom in and the detail fills back in.
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Plan around what you see
Long-press a point on a red line and set it as a destination or a stop, and your route goes through it.
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Tap the button again to clear it
The lines come off and the map is back to normal.
Switching it on changes nothing about how routes are calculated. If you want the router itself to favour bendy roads, that’s the Prefer twisty roads slider — the layer and the routing are two different things and don’t talk to each other.
Tapping the lines
The coloured lines aren’t tappable. There’s no panel, no score readout, no road name — the colour is the whole message. To find out what a road is called, tap the map underneath it and let the app name the spot, or search for it.
It works offline
The bendiness data ships inside your downloaded map region, so the layer is exactly as good in a valley with no bars as it is at home. Nothing is fetched while you use it.
That same data quietly does a second job. When you set a destination that’s nowhere near a road — a lookout, a river bend, a point in the middle of a paddock — the app uses it to find the nearest sealed road within about 15 km, so it can tell you how far you’ll be off the bitumen at the end.
It isn’t remembered between sessions. It does survive the map switching between day and night mid-ride — the lines are put back automatically.
With no region downloaded, or with a damaged twisty-road file, the button lights up and the map stays bare. There’s no error message. If you’re somewhere you know is full of corners and see nothing, check the region is installed under Download Maps.
Getting to it
The twisty road layer is a premium feature. On a free plan the button is still there; tapping it brings up the upgrade prompt rather than the lines.