For Lake District walkers
The car park is full. Now what?
RoutePark reads the GPX of the walk you are planning and shows, before you leave home, where else you could park for it, where each place joins the walk, and when there is no real plan B at all.
RoutePark is in beta: it has not been fully tested yet, so some of it will be wrong or will break. Tell us what goes wrong.
New in the Peak District: for any walk there, RoutePark lists the public car parks near it, from OpenStreetMap, and says on each one whether we have checked its fee. No plan B cards there yet.
- 183
- walks it knows
- 161
- with places to park named
- 72
- with a bus that helps
101 of 161 walks have no real plan B for the car. It says so.
On most walks, every place we know to park sits close by and serves the same walks, so in our model they overlap too much to be a plan B: they are too alike, not seen full. RoutePark tells you plainly rather than sending you to the next full car park. The honest answer there is to start early, or have another walk in mind.
- 40low overlap in our model
- 20medium overlap
- 101every place overlaps too much
How it works
No GPX yet? Every walk on hikes.guide has one: find a walk. Or open RoutePark and try one of its examples, or download a sample GPX: Loughrigg Terrace (one of our routes) and a made-up line on The Cheviot (to see a walk that is not ours).
1Choose the GPX
The walk you have downloaded or drawn. The file is read on your phone and never sent to anyone.
2See where else to park
Each place with where it joins your walk, measured along mapped paths, not in a straight line, and the bus where one helps.
3Keep it on your phone
One tap keeps the walk, and it opens on the morning with no signal, which is where full car parks usually are.
What it will not do
Knowing the limits is part of the plan.
- No.Say whether anywhere has spaces today.Nobody can promise that for a lay-by. RoutePark tells you what exists, not what is free.
- No.Put the plan on your watch.Getting a route onto a watch needs signal; the fallback lives on your phone.
- No.Measure a walk we have not described.It recognises the 183 walks on hikes.guide. For any other walk it lists the places to park near it, and says it has not measured how they join it or whether they fill together.
Install it
RoutePark runs in your phone’s browser: nothing to download from a store, and no account.
Open RouteParkiPhone or iPad
- Open RoutePark in Safari.
- Tap Share.
- Tap Add to Home Screen.
Android
- Open RoutePark in Chrome.
- Tap Install.
- Share a GPX from another app straight into it.
Figures are read from the parking list of 1 October 2026, the one RoutePark is serving.