Restricted roads
Gates, private tracks, roads marked no-access and stretches under construction — drawn on the map so you can see them while you’re still planning, rather than at the end of a 20 km dead end.
Restricted stretches are drawn as coloured lines. Gates are drawn as pink dots with a white ring — a single point on the road rather than a length of it.
The button is the fifth one down the right-hand side, a circle with a line through it. Its ring turns red while the layer is on.
The four things it draws
- No access — red line. The road is tagged as closed to the public.
- Private — orange line. Someone’s driveway, a station track, a forestry road with an owner.
- Under construction — yellow line. Roadworks, or a road that isn’t finished yet.
- Gate — pink dot. A barrier at one point on the road. It might be unlocked, it might not.
The colour is the only information you get. Nothing opens when you tap a line or a dot, and there’s no key on screen telling you which colour is which, so the list above is worth remembering: red is no access, orange is private, yellow is construction, pink dots are gates.
Using it
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Tap the circle-and-line button on the right
Restrictions inside the area you’re looking at are drawn over the map.
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Check the tracks you were thinking about
Especially useful before committing to a shortcut through a forest or a station. A gate dot part-way along a promising-looking track is exactly the thing you want to know beforehand.
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Pan and zoom freely
The layer redraws each time the map settles, up to 1000 features per downloaded region.
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Tap the button again to clear it
The lines and dots come off.
Turning it on is a viewing choice, nothing more. Routes are worked out separately, and nothing pops up if a planned route crosses a restricted stretch or passes a gate. If you want to avoid one, look at the layer and plan around it yourself.
How good is the data?
It comes from the open map data your region was built from — the same source as the roads themselves. That means it’s as good as whoever last surveyed that track, and it’s a snapshot from the day the region was built, not today.
Two consequences worth taking seriously:
- A road with no marking on it isn’t guaranteed open. Plenty of gates and private tracks have never been tagged by anyone. Absence of a red line is not permission.
- A marked road isn’t guaranteed shut. Gates get removed, roadworks finish, access changes. Treat it as a strong hint to check, not a verdict.
Signs on the ground always win. If the map says the track is fine and the sign says private property, the sign is right.
Offline, and off by default
Everything the layer draws is read from the downloaded map region on your phone. It never goes online, so it works the same out of range as it does at home.
It starts switched off each time you open the app — the setting isn’t remembered. It does survive the map flipping between day and night mid-ride; the lines are put straight back.
If no region is downloaded, or the region’s restricted-road file is damaged, the button lights up and nothing is drawn. There’s no error. An empty map is not proof that everything around you is open — check the region is installed under Download Maps before you read anything into it.
Getting to it
The restricted roads layer is a premium feature. On a free plan the button is still on screen; tapping it brings up the upgrade prompt instead of the lines.