How to use Nobody's Road
A short field guide to 10,628 paved rural-road segments across 17 states in the West and Great Plains. Start with the map; return here when a control needs a name.
Read the map
Blue roads are the paved rural roads in this build. Their shade is a traffic band, based on measured annual average daily traffic. The detail card turns that count into a plain-language estimate of how often you might meet a vehicle in a daylight hour.
| Band | Traffic | Felt time |
|---|---|---|
| Solitude | under 85 vehicles/day | a car every 10+ minutes |
| Quiet | 85–200 vehicles/day | a car every 4-10 minutes |
| Easy | 200–400 vehicles/day | a car every 2-4 minutes |
| Steady | 400–1000 vehicles/day | a car every 1-2 minutes |
Tap a road for its count, felt time, trucks, and any available scenic or when-to-ride facts. The map leaves out roads above the top band and roads whose paving was not stated in the source. Read how the numbers are calculated.
When to ride
Open a road’s detail card to see the quieter and busier parts of a day when a pattern is available. The line beneath the readout names its basis; it is part of the result, not a footnote.
- Direct — measured on this road. A federal continuous count station sits on this road, so the panel names the station and the days of hourly counts behind the pattern.
- State-regional pattern. The pattern comes from continuous count stations elsewhere in the same state’s rural roads. It describes the state’s regional shape, not a measurement on this road.
- Borrowed pattern. The state has too few continuous counters of its own, so the pattern is a pooled rural average from other states. It is not measured on this road or in that state.
Find a route
Tap a blue road for the start, then tap another for the finish. Each pin snaps to a mapped road and names it. If a tap misses, the panel names the nearest mapped road and lets you use it. If the two points are in separate pieces of the network, choose Move the finish to bring the finish onto the start’s connected roads, then try again.
Once a route is up, move The trade from More direct toward More solitude. It weighs distance against vehicles met; some places genuinely have only one way through. Turn on Prefer scenic byways & big terrain when you want a scenic connector only when its extra distance and traffic stay modest.
Choose a scenic line
Scenic facts stay separate: an official byway designation, a BLM visual-quality class where one exists, and local relief from elevation data. They are clues with different sources, not one score. A road with no scenic fact simply has no recorded fact to show.
Use the roll chart
Open Roll chart from a solved route for the turns, mileage, and fuel stops in ride order. Use Print for a paper copy. GPX downloads the route with turn and fuel waypoints for a navigation app or device.
Share and return
Copy link makes a permalink for the route and its current choices. Open it later, or send it to a riding partner, to restore that route in the map.
Position, trucks, and services
Use the position control to put your live location and heading on the map; the map continues to work without it. A road detail can show truck share when the source reported it. In Layers, turn on fuel, camping, dispersed sites, or lodging. With a route up, the fuel layer calls out the longest stretch without a mapped fuel stop; it is a straight-line measure between stops, so use it as a planning prompt rather than a detour calculation.
Save a state before you go
In Layers, choose a state under Save for offline. The saved copy includes that state’s roads, routing graph, services, and when-to-ride curves, so route planning still works without a connection. The base map is separate: tiles you have already viewed return, and roads remain readable over an otherwise blank map. Saved states remain until you choose Remove.
Install it
Android: open the browser menu and choose Install app or Add to Home screen. iPhone and iPad: open this site in Safari, tap Share, then choose Add to Home Screen. There is no account or app-store listing.
This guide was built from the same dataset manifest as the map: 10,628 segments and 60,474 miles across 17 states. The wording around features is maintained with the app; the coverage facts regenerate with the data.