The first map built for walking
The quickest route isn't always the best one. Waylight shows you the street that actually feels right — right next to the fastest way — so you can see exactly what a few extra minutes buys you.
Why this matters
Every map answers the same question: how fast? But a six-minute walk down an empty street and a nine-minute walk down a lit one, full of open doors, are not the same trip. Most people already know which one they'd choose — no map has ever asked them.
At 3pm in July, one side of a street can run ten degrees cooler than the other. Waylight knows which side that is, block by block.
Shade-aware routingStreetlights, open cafés, people still out — the walk that feels like company, not a shortcut through the dark.
Light-aware routingTraffic, exhaust, noise — some streets are just louder. Waylight knows the parallel block where you can actually hear yourself think.
Quiet-aware routingHow it works
No black box. Here's exactly what Waylight measures and how it turns that into a route.
Real OpenStreetMap street geometry, the City of Paris's public register of 165,000 streetlights, building heights, and a solar-position model that knows exactly where shade falls, at any hour, on any day.
Every street segment gets a comfort score per time of day — how shaded, how lit, how quiet, how walkable the surface underfoot. Not one verdict. A set of honest measurements you can weigh however matters to you.
Ask for the shaded way, the lit way, or just "the best way" — Waylight lays it next to the quickest route so you can see exactly what it costs, and what it's worth.
Proof, not a pitch
No mockups. This is Waylight running on real Paris streets, right now — the same comparison you'll see in the demo.
Pulled live from the running prototype — Rue Cler to the Musée d'Orsay, right now:
Same time on the clock. One extra block of distance. Lit the whole way, with people and open doors instead of an empty shortcut.
MIT Media Lab's Place Pulse project showed that a street's felt comfort can be predicted from a photo alone, at city-block scale — research still active and cited in 2026. Waylight turns that into something you can use on the walk home tonight.
Why I'm building this
I kept taking the longer way home. Not because I was lost — because the fastest route my phone gave me was a street I didn't want to walk: dark, empty, no open door to duck into if something felt wrong. Every app I owned thought I was being inefficient.
I built Waylight because "which street actually feels better" was invisible to every map I had. It's a question I ask myself most nights, most hot afternoons, most quiet mornings — and I got tired of answering it alone, block by block, with no help.
Walking is the oldest way to move through a city. It deserves a map that treats it like one.
— Ines, building Waylight in Paris
Get early access
Waylight is live in central Paris today, growing block by block. Try the prototype, or leave your email for updates as we expand to new cities.