If you're a runner or cyclist visiting a new city, or even just exploring a different part of your own town, heading out for some impromptu exercise can feel like a bit of a gamble: If you're lucky, you might chart a long, uninterrupted course along safe streets or well-worn trails. More likely, though, you'll find yourself dodging traffic on a path punctuated with stop lights, detours, and blind alleys.

Finding new places to ride or run can be such a pain that, even in their own neighborhoods, many athletes resort to traversing the same handful of routes over and over and over. "I'm stuck on the same two loops," says James Quarles, CEO of Strava, the GPS-powered, workout-tracking social network for the aerobically inclined. He lives in a suburb south of San Francisco, where he says a lot of the streets disappear and dead-end, which is why he'd rather retread the routes he knows than waste time finding new ones.

Rarely is the most direct path from A to B ideal for running or biking; Strava's data reveals the paths that athletes actually spend time on.

It's a shame—not just for the head Strava but anyone who enjoys exercising outside, one of the greatest joys of which is finding fresh perspectives on one's surroundings.

Strava

To make it easier for the fleet of foot to find new places to rack up miles, Strava today unveiled a handy beta feature it calls Route Builder for Mobile. The straightforwardly named tool, which lives inside the Strava app, is purpose-built for smartphones and makes finding new routes as simple as tracing your finger over a map: Just draw where you want to go and it spits out an ideal path.

Strava assembles that path from fragments of the billions of rides and runs stockpiled on its servers. Strava's database is perhaps the largest repository of geotagged fitness data on earth. It contains trillions of GPS points from user-uploaded activities. That data hoard is what makes a tool like Route Builder more useful to athletes than, say, Google Maps. Rarely is the most direct path from A to B ideal for running or biking; Strava's data reveals the paths that athletes actually spend time on.

But the mobile Route Builder's real draw is how easy it is to use. Tools for creating routes have existed on desktop for years through programs like Google Earth and websites like plotaroute.com, but using them is a bit of a chore: You mark the start of your activity by placing a pin on a map, then drop a second pin a little ways up the street, a third pin a little beyond that, and so on. It's time-consuming, attention-hungry work—the kind of point-and-click task a researcher might use to evaluate your fine motor skills. And while other mobile apps with finger-drawing, route-snapping interfaces do exist, none draws from an activity database as large as Strava’s to optimize its routes. (At least one of these apps, Footpath, looks to have inspired aspects of Strava’s new tool.1)