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The gate across the track

· 4 min read
Massimo Di Stefano
Massimo Di Stefano
FastGIS author

Dirt-first routing sends you down forest roads, and forest roads have gates. Most you open and close behind you. Some are padlocked, and the only thing worse than a locked gate 40 km in is one nobody told you about. Routes now carry their gates: drawn on the track, avoided when they are shut, and called out on the way.

Closed gates are routed around​

The routing tiles know a gate exists. They do not know it is locked: locked=yes and seasonal *:conditional closures are not parsed into them at all. So the server reads the gates on your route straight from OpenStreetMap and decides, for your vehicle and your departure date, whether each one is passable.

A gate that is locked, private, or closed for the season is routed around. A passable one stays the router's call — opening a gate for 20 km of gravel is usually a good trade, and dirt-first weighs it as one. Avoid closed gates is on by default, in the rider app under Settings → Routing, and in the desktop planner's advanced settings.

Sometimes there is no way around: a locked gate on a dead-end track, or one at the place you are going. Then the route is kept and you are told, because a router that quietly sends you at a padlock is worse than one that admits it.

Told before, and told again on the way​

  • The plan lists the gates on the route, and a closed one gets a red warning naming it: Gate at 2.4 km — locked.
  • Start asks before it begins. On CarPlay and Android Auto, where there is no dialog to tap, the warning is spoken right after the first instruction.
  • Gates are drawn on the track — white with an amber ring when passable, red when closed — on the phone, on the car screen, and on the desktop map.
  • Navigation announces them: "Gate in 300 m. Close it behind you." A closed one gets its own warning with the alert tone, a kilometre out and again at 250 m. Toll booths and bollards are announced too, in all ten languages.
  • A roadbook generated for the route carries the gate as a line of its own.

If you go off-route and the app re-plans, the gates come with it. A reroute also stops treating the gate you just turned back from as "where you were going" — before, a route recomputed 100 m short of a padlock would send you at it again.

How far dirt-first may detour​

Gravel is slower than tarmac, which is the point, and it is usually not much longer. Occasionally it is: the strongest preset can find a corridor that adds half the trip again. Max detour now caps that in distance — 1.2×, 1.5× (the default) or no cap at all — and when the cap bites, the plan steps down a preset and offers you the one you asked for:

Moderate applied — the full Strong route is 1.4× the length of the plain route. +28 km · +1 h 24 min compared with this route. Use the full Strong route.

One tap takes it, and the ride's reroutes keep it uncapped. Évora to Beja is a good example: 83 km at 38% unpaved inside a 1.2× cap, or 112 km at 71% unpaved if the gravel is the reason you came.

What it does not know yet​

Routes computed offline on the phone are not gate-checked — there is no OpenStreetMap lookup out there. The app says Gates not checked on an offline route rather than pretending the road is clear; the gate data for offline packs is the next piece of this. Free-text winter-closure notes ("Vinterstenging") are shown, never enforced: a note is not a rule.