Reference
What the path is actually made of
Route planners tend to treat "cycle path" as one category. It isn't. Here is what you will meet, what it costs you, and what tyre it wants.
Asphalt asfalt
The default on main routes. Smooth, fast, usually well maintained. The only complaint is tree-root heave in older forest sections, which arrives without warning and will unseat a bidon.
Concrete slabs betonplaten
Common on polder access roads and dike tops. Fast enough, but the gap between slabs produces a rhythmic thump every few metres that becomes genuinely tiring over forty kilometres. Nobody mentions this and everybody feels it.
Brick klinkers
Village centres and older paths. Rideable but buzzy, and treacherous when wet with leaves. Watch the rails-and-grooves sections around tram lines on city outskirts.
Shell paths schelpenpad
Crushed shells, mostly in dune and coastal reserves. Looks idyllic, rides like soft gravel. Loose after dry weather and firm after rain, which is the opposite of what you would expect and catches people out every summer.
Sand zandpad
Heathland and forest in the eastern provinces. Somewhere between rideable and unrideable depending entirely on recent weather and traffic. Flagged in the planner output. On a road bike, plan around it — walking two kilometres in cleats is a specific kind of misery.
Surface mix by region
Share of tagged network length. Useful for deciding what bike to put in the car.
| Region | Asphalt | Concrete | Brick | Shell | Sand |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Noord-Holland coastal | 62% | 8% | 6% | 24% | 0% |
| Zuid-Holland polders | 71% | 19% | 8% | 2% | 0% |
| Utrecht | 66% | 7% | 13% | 0% | 14% |
| Zeeland delta | 69% | 22% | 4% | 5% | 0% |
| Noord-Brabant | 74% | 11% | 3% | 0% | 12% |
| Limburg hills | 88% | 3% | 9% | 0% | 0% |
How the tagging works
Surface data comes partly from open mapping sources and partly from riders. Open data reliably tells you a path exists. It rarely tells you the path has been sand since the reconstruction three years ago, which is exactly the thing you want to know.
Segments carry a last-verified date. Anything older than two seasons is worth treating as a hint rather than a fact — reconstruction happens constantly and nobody announces it.
Correcting a segment. Send the two node numbers either side, the surface you actually found, and roughly when you rode it. That is enough. Corrections go live within a week.