We present a route planning technique solely based on the concept of node contraction. We contract or remove one node at a time out of the graph and add shortcut edges to the remaining graph to preserve shortest paths distances. The resulting contraction hierarchy (CH), the original graph plus shortcuts, also defines an order of “importance” among all nodes through the node selection. We apply a modified bidirectional Dijkstra algorithm that takes advantage of this node order to obtain shortest paths. The search space is reduced by relaxing only edges leading to more important nodes in the forward search and edges coming from more important nodes in the backward search. Both search scopes eventually meet at the most important node on a shortest path. We use a simple but extensible heuristic to obtain the node order: a priority queue whose priority function for each node is a linear combination of several terms, e.g. one term weights nodes depending on the sparsity of the remaining graph after the contraction. Another term regards the already contracted nodes to allow a more uniform contraction. Depending on the application we can select the combination of the priority terms to obtain the required hierarchy. We have five times lower query times than the best previous hierarchical Dijkstra-based speedup techniques and a negative space overhead, i.e., the data structure for distance computation needs less space than the input graph.