Overview
We give cycling-first directions along protected lanes and quiet streets, with safety colour-coding so you only cross major roads at lights. We build a routing model for every city. Every road in it is rated for cycling safety, and routes are colour-coded by that rating. Requests that setsupersafe route on this model rather than taking the shortest line: major crossings land at traffic lights and four-way stops, and busy roads are used only where they genuinely earn their place.
The model is not static. City data is refreshed daily, and rider reports feed back into routing in real time. A road closed this morning is routed around this afternoon. See Reports for how observations enter that loop.
Safety colours
Every cycling segment carries one of five classes. They are what the colours on our maps and route lines mean, and what the routing model is optimising over. SuperSafe routing prefers the first two, treats moderate roads as a cost worth paying only for a real saving, and avoids busy roads and shared paths unless there is no alternative. Turningsupersafe off gives you the direct route instead, which is free to take any of them.
All of these are visible in the response. A step’s safety_classification names its class directly: quiet, cycleway, moderate, busy, or shared. The numeric safety_code is deprecated. A step’s cycle_routes lists the signed city routes it follows. A step’s lit reports whether the road is lit, which is what night routing optimises for.
Choosing an endpoint
POST /directions/v2/ is the one you want for a single route between waypoints, with turn-by-turn steps, voice cues, and banner instructions. Set supersafe to route on the safety model, and departure_time to route for a particular time of day.
POST /multi-modal/v2/ returns several ways to make the same trip, folding in live bike-share availability: a personal bike route, in both the SuperSafe and the direct variant, alongside docked, e-bike, and dockless options.
POST /explain-supersafe/ returns one sentence saying why the SuperSafe route differs from the direct one, for example "Takes the C13 cycleway and avoids moderately busy Goldsmiths' Row". Use it to caption a route you are already showing.
Coverage
SuperSafe routing is available in New York City, Los Angeles, the SF Bay Area, and London. Outside these cities a routing request returns400 with code: CROSS_CITY_ROUTE.
Night routing applies in London and New York City. Elsewhere metadata.nighttime is always false, whatever the departure time, because the lit-street data that makes it meaningful is not in place yet.
Street lighting data is © OpenStreetMap contributors, and coverage is approximate.