I am planning to ride South Korea’s Cross Country cycle route in late 2025. In this series of posts, I will explain how I generated a GPX file of the route using Open Street Map data. I shall use the GPX file with my bike’s navigation computer.

The Cross Country cycle route runs from Incheon to Busan. It is sometimes, incorrectly, called the Four Rivers cycle road.

If you just want the GPX file that I created, you can jump straight to the last post in the series, GPX file for South Korea’s Cross Country Cycle Route.

Step 1 – Making the initial GPX file

Using data from Open Street Map (a reasonably open, accurate and up to date source of mapping data) to produce a GPX file of the whole route.

• Identifying the cycle paths on Open Street Maps
• Using Overpass Turbo to save the Open Street Map data as GPX files
• Trimming the cycle path GPX files
• Merging the GPX files into one file

Step 2 – Improving the GPX file

The GPX file produced in part 1 has a few limitations. The file includes many segments. The segments are not in any order. They don’t form a linked chain of paths. They can run in opposing directions. Therefore, the file is not as useful as it could be.

In Step 2 we use BRouter-Web to recreate the GPX file as a continuous path.

• Tracing the route with BRouter-Web

Step 3 – Riding the route

In October 2025, I rode the route and retained GPS logs of my trip.

Step 4 – Refining the route

I compared the actual GPS logs of my trip with the planned route and made some updates to the route files. The updated were required because of things such as:

• One village had signage prohibiting riders from cycling along the main street and directing them around the edge of the township.
• New track segments had been created, and these weren’t in the source data files.
• A low bridge had been damaged by floodwater, so a diversion was in place.

The updates were generally made using BRouter-Web, and with GPX Studio to trim and merge the files.

Here’s the result:

• GPX file for South Korea’s Cross Country Cycle Route

Alternative approaches

It would have been possible to use other approaches to get GPX files for the route from a source like RideWithGPS (example 1, example 2, example 3) or from this post on Naver, but I wanted to generate a GPX file independently.

It would also have been possible to avoid some of the intermediate steps here. For example, you could just refer to the Open Street Map cycle paths while using BRouter-Web to create the GPX file.