Show HN: Grid Mapper – a routing tool for finding safe, fun ways through cities
gridmapper.ccI started building this over a year ago to help plan routes for a social bike ride I help lead in St. Louis. I got annoyed with existing tools either being clunky to use, routing us down arterials, or making it hard to share routes. Then I let feature creep take over and it became something more general for getting around cities by bike, foot, or train.
What I think is cool about it:
- Custom routing profiles that try to find safe and fun ways through the city. The route line can be colorized based on traffic safety or steepness.
- Drop pins to mark cool spots you find or safety hazards. Currently anonymous submissions are allowed (not sure how long that will last).
- Deep OSM integration for both safety ratings and querying features along routes.
- Simple public profiles so you can find friends or a ride leader on the map during group rides.
- Train integration for multi-modal trips. Bike to a station, ride partway, continue biking. Pretty rough around the edges stil, and depends on having decent data from HERE.
- Way more map customization than anyone asked for (crosshatch patterns, color themes, etc). I just like making maps.
- Simple A to B routes, or you can plot a route with some pretty solid route editing tools (insert waypoint, move, delete, etc).
- Gratuitous LLM integration for route safety and fun analysis, if you toggle it on in preferences.
- Built with MapLibre GL, Alpine.js, and FastAPI. Intentionally simple tech stack. Maybe 50% of the code written with LLM assistance.
No monetization yet, though I'll have to figure that out here soon. Any features related to safety will always be free.
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