Runplanner Goes Worldwide

Big news: Runplanner now plans running routes anywhere in the world. Drop waypoints in Tokyo, generate a roundtrip in Buenos Aires, or map out your race weekend in New York — every route snaps to real roads, footpaths, and trails, exactly like it always has closer to home.

From one region to the whole planet

Until this week, Runplanner's road-snapped routing covered Europe. That served most of our runners well — but every month we saw routes being planned from further afield: travelers, expats, runners training for races abroad. Their routes fell back to less accurate planning the moment they left the map.

So we rebuilt our routing server around the full planet. Runplanner runs its own routing infrastructure — the open-source Valhalla engine working through a 93 GB routing graph built from OpenStreetMap, the map made by millions of volunteer mappers around the world. No big-tech routing APIs, no per-request fees, no compromises on our privacy promise.

The best part: you don't need to update anything. Because routing happens on our server, worldwide coverage already works in the app version installed on your phone right now. Open the map, fly somewhere far away, tap — it routes.

Traffic lights on your route — now worldwide

Runplanner marks traffic lights along your planned route, so you know where your tempo run might get interrupted before you even lace up. That feature used to be limited to the Netherlands. With version 1.3.4, rolling out on Google Play now, it works everywhere: the app knows about nearly 2 million mapped traffic lights across the globe and shows the ones near your route, wherever that route happens to be.

What this means for your running

• Plan before you travel: Map out your morning run in a city you've never visited, from your couch. Distance, elevation, surfaces — all known before you land. We wrote a full guide on planning running routes when traveling.
• Roundtrips from any hotel: Set a distance, and the roundtrip generator builds a loop from wherever you're staying — Lisbon, Singapore, or a highway motel in Ohio.
• Race weekends abroad: Preview the course area, plan your shakeout runs, and navigate them with turn-by-turn directions in a city where you don't speak the language.
• Same app, same simplicity: Everything else works exactly as before — GPX export, QR sharing, weather, elevation profiles, and scheduling.

Privacy didn't change

Going global changed our map, not our principles. There's still no account, no profile, and no tracking — your routes stay encrypted on your device, and route requests to our server aren't tied to who you are. The same promise we made on day one, now valid on every continent.

— Lesley Natrop

Frequently asked questions