Your running app keeps sending you up the steepest hill. Here’s the fix.

Ask a typical route planner for a "flat" run and you'll often still get marched up the single steepest street nearby. That's because most tools only look at total ascent — the sum of all the up — and a route can have modest total climb while still containing one nasty 12% wall.

Total ascent is the wrong number to optimise. What you actually feel is gradient: how steep it gets, where, and for how long.

Routing by the ground, not a guess

Stricca builds routes on a real road-routing engine running on OpenStreetMap data — so a route is always a line you can genuinely run or walk, never an AI-drawn squiggle. On top of that, we layer the metadata the map already carries:

• Gradient-aware "flat". A flat request penalises steep edges directly, so it threads the gentler streets instead of just keeping the total down. It'll take a slightly longer, kinder line over a short vicious ramp.
• Surface-aware. Ask to stay on pavement and it keeps off the muddy forest path running right beside the road; ask for trail and it seeks the dirt out. It then tells you honestly how much of the route is unpaved.
• Quiet-roads. Traffic-avoiding language pushes the route off main roads onto back streets — and if it has to touch a main road to make the distance work, it says so.
• "Challenging" and "scenic" vibes. One leans into rough, rugged, climbing terrain; the other toward waymarked trails, bridges, water and nature paths.

Honesty is a feature

Every claim is grounded in data and cited. If the surface is estimated from the road type rather than an explicit tag, Stricca hedges. If your loop crosses a main road for 600 m with no guaranteed pavement, it flags it. It knows a road is walkable; it can't see live traffic or a closed gate, and it tells you to glance at the satellite view before heading out.

That's the whole idea: describe the run you want, get a route you can actually trust — hills and all, but only the hills you asked for.