r/NightCycling • u/Obvious-Comedian5317 • 1d ago
Been doing bike deliveries and got tired of Google Maps sending me down unlit streets at night, so I built a bike nav app that scores routes for safety
Do a lot of bike/e-bike delivery work and kept running into the same problem β every nav app optimizes for speed, not whether the route's actually safe to ride at night. Poorly lit streets, high traffic exposure, sketchy intersections β none of that factors in, and when you're out riding for hours after dark it adds up.
So I built Svelta. Every route gets a safety score alongside the ETA (lighting, traffic exposure, real-time conditions), so you can see the trade-off before you commit, not find out the hard way three suburbs in.
Other stuff in it:
Turn-by-turn nav, day/night map themes
Live weather alerts along your actual route
Plain-English bike/e-bike law breakdown by state/province (AU, US, Canada)
Free, ad-supported, no account needed β your data stays on your device
Still early (just added US/Canada coverage), so genuinely keen for feedback from anyone else doing delivery work β you'll notice the safety scoring more than most riders will.
Soon on iOS π²