How do I find twisty roads near me?
Look for roads with a lot of corners per mile, little traffic and few intersections — usually two-lane state and county roads that follow rivers or cross ridges. The fastest way is a tool that measures curvature for you: Road & Rally's Road Finder scans any area and ranks every road in it on how much it bends and how well it flows.
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What makes a road good to drive
Corners per mile is the single most telling number: a road that bends every few hundred yards keeps you busy, a road that bends twice a mile does not. Flow matters too — a run of linked corners with no stop signs, towns or driveways is better than the same corners broken up by junctions. Surface and traffic finish the picture.
Good roads cluster where the terrain forces them to: along rivers, over passes, and up and down ridges. If you can see hills on the map, start there.
How Road Finder scores them
Road Finder takes every road in the area you are looking at, joins the map's short segments back into whole roads, and grades each one on curvature and flow. The technical ones rise to the top, and you can filter by length so a two-mile hillclimb and a fifty-mile run don't compete.
Every corner is graded on the rally 1–6 scale from the road's own geometry, where 1 is a hairpin. When you drive the road in the app, it calls those corners out before you reach them.
Before you drive it
Check the surface on satellite view or street-level imagery — some of the curviest lines on a map are gravel. Drive it once at an easy pace before you enjoy it, and keep it legal: these are public roads with driveways, cyclists and wildlife.
Questions
- Is there an app that finds curvy roads?
- Yes. Road & Rally's Road Finder ranks every road in an area by curvature and flow. It is in the iPhone and Android apps and on roadnrally.com with a free account.
- What is a good number of corners per mile?
- Most fun two-lane roads grade somewhere above ten corners per mile; the famous mountain roads grade far higher. Compare roads on the same measure rather than looking for one magic number.
- Can I find twisty roads with Google Maps?
- You can look for squiggly lines and use avoid-highways routing, but Google Maps does not measure curvature or rank roads for driving. A dedicated tool does that part for you.
Keep reading
- What are the best driving roads near Asheville, NC?The Blue Ridge Parkway, NC 215, US 276 through Pisgah Forest, NC 209 and the Diamondback at Little Switzerland — the best driving roads within a couple of hours of Asheville, mapped and graded.
- What is the best app for driving enthusiasts?What a driving enthusiast app should do — find great roads, navigate them with pace notes, record drives and run group drives — and how Road & Rally covers each.