Why Google Maps doesn't find the best motorcycle roads
Google Maps is a marvel. It moves a billion people through traffic every day, reroutes around wrecks in seconds, and knows the closing time of a taco stand in a town you’ve never heard of. None of this is sarcasm. It’s the best navigator ever built.
It is also, for a rider, the wrong tool for choosing a road — and the reason is structural, not a missing feature.
Google’s objective function isn’t yours
Every routing engine optimizes something. Google optimizes arrival time, occasionally traded against distance and fuel. That’s the correct objective for nearly everyone: for most people the road is a cost — minutes between where they are and where they’d rather be.
Riders invert that. The road is the point. The destination is often an excuse. A routing engine that treats every mile as a cost will, correctly and every time, route you around the exact roads you bought the bike for. The interstate isn’t a bug in its answer. It is the answer, given the question it was asked.
”Avoid highways” doesn’t ask a different question
The standard workaround is to toggle avoid highways and hope. But avoidance is subtraction, not preference. Take the interstate away and the engine picks the next-fastest thing: four-lane arterials, stroads, the truck route through town. It still has no concept of a good road — it just lost access to its favorite one.
The information that makes a road worth riding — how often it bends, how the bends chain together, how it climbs — is knowable from map data. It’s simply not in Google’s objective, because for a billion users it shouldn’t be.
What a riding road actually is, in data
OpenStreetMap describes every road on earth as a chain of coordinates. From that geometry you can compute the thing riders feel in their hands: heading change per mile. A straight road barely accumulates any. Highway 12 through southern Utah accumulates a lot.
Density alone isn’t enough, though. One hairpin in forty flat miles is a photo stop, not a ride. What we score is closer to rhythm — sustained sequences of direction change, weighted so that a road which keeps bending beats a road with one dramatic kink. Add penalties for the things that break rhythm (dense intersections, urban crawl) and you have an objective function a rider would recognize.
Throttle runs that objective on our own routing engine — a self-hosted GraphHopper with custom motorcycle profiles built from OSM data. The dial in the app (Fast / Balanced / Backroads / Twisties) is really one number: how much extra time you’re willing to spend per unit of curve. Twisties is honest about the trade — the twisty way is slower. Slower is what you asked for.
A route isn’t a plan yet
Finding the curvy line is half the problem. A 300-mile backroads day is also a fuel problem (twisty miles drain a tank faster than the odometer suggests), a meal problem (lunch should land at noon, not wherever the highway offers an exit), and a fatigue problem (your concentration has a range, too).
So after the route, Throttle places stops: gas inside your tank range, food inside meal windows, breaks on a fatigue cycle, overnights when the ride outruns the day — each stop a real place from the map, not a pin in a parking lot. The weather at each stop is forecast for when you’ll actually arrive there, which on a two-day loop is not the weather at home when you leave.
And then we hand it back to Google
Here’s the part that surprises people: after all that, Throttle exports your ride to Google Maps and gets out of the way.
Navigation — live traffic, reroutes, voice prompts, lane guidance — is a different product, and Google has spent twenty years being the best in the world at it. We don’t pretend otherwise. Each leg of your plan becomes a Google Maps link carrying your stops plus invisible shaping points that hold Google to the roads we chose. Phone open, tap, ride.
We plan. Google navigates. Both tools doing the one thing they’re actually for.
Try it on a road you know
Throttle is in open beta — every feature, no card. The fastest way to see the difference is the Roads page: pick a road you’ve ridden, and compare what we draw against what the fastest-route answer would have given you. If we get one wrong, the app has a tell us link — the engine learns from riders who know better.
Coverage today is the US, Canada, Mexico, and India. Plan a route in Europe and the app takes your email for the waitlist — it’s map data we haven’t imported yet, not a paywall.
