Field notes 5 MIN READ
What size should a route print be?
The honest answer depends on the route, not the wall. A city marathon and a 300 km bikepacking loop want different sheets, and here is why.
People ask this expecting an answer about walls. The more useful answer is about routes.
A route has a natural size
Two things decide how large a print needs to be: how much the line doubles back on itself, and how much you want to read.
A point-to-point — a coastal ride, a long walk, a crossing — is a simple shape. It reads at any size. On 30×40 it is a clean object rather than a small one.
A city marathon is dense. It folds back on itself, crosses itself, and has sections where two kilometres of running occupy a centimetre. At 30×40 those sections merge into a smudge. At 50×70 they separate.
A heatmap of a season is hundreds of overlapping lines. It needs the space between them to be visible, or it is a dark knot with pale legs. This is the one case where the largest size is not indulgence.
Where more paper stops helping
There is a ceiling, and it is not the printer.
At 300 dpi a 50×70 sheet is about 5 900 pixels across. A 200 km ride drawn across it is roughly one millimetre per kilometre. Every wobble in the recording is drawn at that scale too — and past a certain enlargement you are no longer revealing the route, you are revealing GPS error.
For most routes 70×100 is where that trade turns. Beyond it, a bigger sheet mostly buys a larger version of the same information.
The practical reading
- 30×40 — a single clean route. A gift that does not require the recipient to rearrange a room. Good on a shelf, in a hallway, above a desk. - 50×70 — the default. Reads from across a room; dense city routes still separate. - 70×100 — long routes with real structure, and every heatmap.
And the frame is part of the size
A 50×70 in a frame with a mount is closer to 70×90 on the wall. If the space is measured, it is worth measuring the frame rather than the sheet before deciding.
Questions people actually ask
- What is the most popular size?
- 50×70 cm. It is large enough to read the line from across a room and small enough to hang without a project.
- Does a bigger sheet show more detail?
- Up to a point. Beyond a certain size the limit stops being the paper and becomes the recording — GPS noise gets enlarged along with everything else.
- What size for a heatmap?
- The largest you can live with. A heatmap is hundreds of lines and needs room between them, so 70×100 is the first size where it stops being a knot.
- Will a small print look empty?
- Only if the route is a simple shape. A straight out-and-back on 30×40 reads well; a dense city marathon does not.
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