Route Explorer

When to use it

• Sketching where a farm track, a driveway or a walking track could go on a hillside.
• Checking whether a grade limit can be met at all between two points.

How to use it

1. Open Route Explorer and tap the start and the end.
2. Set the maximum route grade in percent.
3. Finish endpoints and run. The route is drawn, and the profile appears in the panel.
4. Export the route as GeoJSON and the profile as CSV.

How it works

Terrain is loaded for the two endpoints plus a 500 m margin. Every cell is a node connected to its eight neighbours, with a cost that grows with distance and with grade, and a very high cost above your limit. The lowest-cost path from start to end is found, which is why the route zig-zags up a face rather than going straight.

Reading the results

The profile shows the grade the route actually achieves. If parts still exceed your limit, no route within the margin could avoid them.

Length and total climb are along the route, not the straight line.

Limits and warnings

• A terrain exploration aid, not a road design. No cut and fill, drainage, culverts, sight distances or legal access are considered.
• The search is limited to 500 m either side of the endpoints, so a route that needs a wide detour will not be found.
• Where 1 m LiDAR has not been flown the tool falls back to the national 8 m elevation model, and the result says what share came from the fallback. The 8 m model was interpolated from 20 m map contours and is not fit for site-scale decisions.

Data and attribution

Results come from the LINZ national 1 m LiDAR bare-earth elevation model, read in your browser, with the national 8 m model filling any gaps. Tools that use the surface model (Sunlight, Viewshed, Object Heights) read the matching LiDAR surface tiles.

Elevation and cadastral data is sourced from the LINZ Data Service and licensed for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. Copyright in each LiDAR survey belongs to the body that commissioned it — a regional or district council, Waka Kotahi, NIWA and around thirty others — rather than to LINZ, which hosts and processes the national dataset. Every file exported from this site names the licensors whose surveys cover the area, and anything you publish from those files carries the same attribution requirement. See https://www.linz.govt.nz/products-services/data/licensing-and-using-data/attributing-elevation-or-aerial-imagery-data

Related

Neighbouring tools

• Elevation Profile — Produces a cross-section of the ground along any line, with distance, total climb and descent, and gradient.
• Slope & Aspect — Maps how steep every part of your area is and which compass direction each face points, with a full breakdown of slope classes and aspect shares.
• Measure — Measures both the flat map distance and the true distance over the ground along a line, which is longer on steep terrain.