Routes are computed in your browser over 160,000 street segments, with USGS 1 m lidar elevation on the Overture / OpenStreetMap street graph. The slider runs the whole trade-off between distance and climbing: every route nothing else beats on both, from the shortest to the flattest worth walking. Sliding right never shortens the route and never adds climbing. Climbing is total gain, not the difference between the endpoints. Stairs count on foot, not on a bike.
The loop button turns the trip into a loop from one start: the slider sets the distance, dozens of loops of about that length are tried in every direction and the flattest is shown; tick allow out and back to include the same streets there and back, which is often flatter still. On a bike, prefer calm streets counts protected lanes and paths (SFMTA bikeway network) as shorter than they are and busy arterials as longer.
mi / km at the top switches between miles and kilometres. GPX downloads the route on show with its elevation, for Strava, Garmin Connect, Komoot and the like. Place search is offline: the city's intersections, places and addresses are built into this page. Source, data and the full analysis.
by Drew Edwards