When you go off-route

There are two reasons you end up off the pink line: you missed a turn, or you saw a better road. NavForge tries to tell those apart. It will spend a little while trying to bring you back — and if you keep going your own way, it stops arguing and works out a fresh route from where you actually are.

Pink is your route. The amber dashed line is the short leg the app has worked out to get you back onto it.

While it’s thinking, the turn card shows Recalculating… with a spinner in place of the turn arrow.

Off the route, with a return leg drawn. drawn from code

How it notices

Every time your position updates, the app measures the shortest straight-line distance from you to the route line. Two things have to happen before it reacts:

  • You have to be more than 40 metres from the route, and
  • you have to have ridden 18 metres while that’s still true.

The second condition is what stops a wide roundabout, a bus lane or a moment of GPS wobble from triggering a reroute. At 30 km/h it takes a couple of seconds to satisfy. Ride back onto the route before then and the counter resets and nothing happens at all.

It’s a straight-line measurement, not a map lookup.

The app is measuring the gap between you and the drawn route, not working out which road you’re on. Practically, that means a service road or a parallel carriageway running within 40 metres of your route won’t count as off-route — and a hairpin that briefly puts you 50 metres from the line as the crow flies can start the counter even though you never left the road. The 18-metre travel requirement absorbs most of it.

Missing a turn

  1. You hear Rerouting.

    Spoken immediately, cutting through anything else being said.

  2. An amber line appears

    It runs from where you are to the nearest sensible point ahead on your original route. The original pink route stays on the map — it hasn’t been thrown away.

  3. You get one instruction

    Something like “In 300 metres, turn left onto …”, telling you how to get onto the return leg. After that the voice goes quiet until you’re back on the route — it isn’t going to narrate every step of a 200-metre detour.

  4. Back within 40 metres of the original route

    The amber line clears, the pink route comes back, and you hear Back on your route.

The return leg is deliberately not allowed to open with a U-turn. If the routing engine’s first answer starts with one, the app asks again while excluding that intersection, and only falls back to the U-turn version if there’s genuinely no other way. When that happens, the turn card’s border turns red so you can see it coming.

Taking your own way

Sometimes you left the route because you wanted to. The app gives up on bringing you back when any one of these is true:

  • The gap to the return point has grown more than 120 metres beyond what it was when rerouting started, and it’s still growing.
  • The gap jumped by more than 100 metres in a single position update — you’ve taken a slip road or a very different direction.
  • It’s been trying for 15 seconds and the gap hasn’t come down by at least half.
  • There’s no point on the original route ahead of you that it can reasonably aim for.

At that point it stops trying to shepherd you back. The amber line is removed, and a completely fresh route is calculated from your current position to your destination. That new route becomes the route — future off-route checks are measured against it, not against the one you rejected.

This is the behaviour to lean on when you’re exploring.

You don’t have to stop and re-plan to take a road that looks good. Take it. Ride past the point where the app can pull you back and it will quietly rebuild the route around your choice, keeping the same destination and the same routing preferences.

Things it won’t do

It won’t reroute you into a loop

After any recalculation there’s a 30-second quiet window where no new reroute can be triggered. Without it, a rider heading confidently the “wrong” way gets a new route every couple of seconds, each one immediately obsolete.

It won’t reroute you at the door

Within 250 metres of your destination, reroute logic switches off completely. Last-minute recalculations as you swing into a car park are noise, not help.

It won’t hand you a U-turn without warning

Forward recalculations get the same treatment as return legs: alternatives requested, the U-turn intersection excluded on a retry, and a red card border if it’s unavoidable. If the destination ends up more than 120° behind you, the app routes to a point further along your original route instead of spinning you around on the spot.

When the reroute fails

A failed reroute shows you nothing.

If the routing engine can’t produce a route — you’ve ridden off the edge of the map region you downloaded, or the data for where you are is missing — the spinner stops, the turn card goes back to the old instruction, and no message appears. There’s no error, no toast, no retry prompt.

The symptom to watch for is a turn card that’s describing a road you’re nowhere near. If that happens, stop somewhere safe and set the destination again, and check the region covering where you are is actually downloaded.

After resuming an interrupted ride

If NavForge was killed mid-ride and you tapped Resume, the route comes back but your routing preferences don’t. Any reroute from that point uses plain motorcycle routing rather than the preferences you set when you planned the trip. The original route is unchanged — but if you go off it and the app rebuilds, the replacement won’t reflect the same choices. On a long day out it’s worth ending the resumed session and re-planning the remainder.

Free riding

None of this applies when you’re not navigating. With no route set there’s nothing to be off, so ride wherever you like — the map, the speed display and speed camera alerts all keep working exactly as they do during navigation.

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