"100% routing" is live

2 April 2026 by Craig

As much fun as it is to go knock out a bunch of untraveled roads, sometimes you just want to do something without a ton of planning. Wandrer now has “100% routing” tools for you, which will let you easily make a route that covers every road in an area all in one go.

What is this?

This problem is sometimes called “Chinese postman” routing, after the mathematician that first proposed the problem: suppose you’re a postal carrier, and you need to travel down every street in an area to deliver mail. What’s the most efficient way to do so?

100% routing in Wandrer is implemented in a way that doesn’t necessarily produce the optimal/shortest route, but rather that it produces a “plausible” route: something similar to what a human would do. A lot of times this is actaully quite close to optimal, but not striving for optimal means that generating routes for bigger areas becomes more feasible.

In general, 100% routes tend to be around 25-33% bigger than the total distance within the area. This is going to vary depending on the number of dead-end and one-way roads, but is a decent rule: 10 km of road will require 12-13km of travel.

As an aside, the “Chinese postman problem” falls in the realm graph theory, a discipline that seems to come up with very practical names for its problems. There’s also the “7 Bridges of Koenigsburg problem” (is it possible to cross 7 bridges in the town of Koenigsberg once and only once? No, it’s not.), the “New York street sweeper problem” (a Chinese Postman variant where you have a lot of one-way streets and turn restrictions), and the “Windy street sweeper problem” (a Chinese Postman variant where some directions easier to travel than others, because of wind/traffic/elevation/etc.).

100% routing is available only for upgraded Wandrer users, and only on desktop.

To create a route, open the toolbar in the top right of the big map and choose Route Generator:

Once there, you can search for a place by name or draw your own shape by clicking the pencil icon:

You can also make a route from a given selected area:

One thing about the route boundary: the start and end points of a road must be contained within your area to be routable. If either one is outside of your boundary, even by a little bit, it will not be included.

However you get there, you’ll then be presented with a window to set some parameters about your route: activity type, start point, end point, and whether to try to avoid already-traveled roads. Avoiding already-traveled roads is a “best-effort” attempt and may still result in covering already-traveled roads.

Place your markers and click “Create Route”:

Once it’s created, you can “play” the sequence of the route (since they can often cross over themselves) and download a text cuesheet (recommended!) as well as GPX file of the route:

Enjoy! Definitely check out how the route proceeds before popping it on to your computer and going for it. The algorithms can make mistakes, but oftentimes there is a method to their madness. Following a machine’s instructions can feel weird and it might not do things in an order that is intuitive.

And as always, let me know any way that I can improve this for you.

Related Stories: