How it works
Calm first.
Fast second.
Most map apps look for the quickest way. Kickstand looks for the way that feels best on a bike: away from heavy traffic, on lanes with real separation, through junctions you won't dread. Here's how it reads Chicago's streets, and how it decides.
The idea
Three beliefs shape every route.
How it feels matters
A ride you'd happily do every day beats one that's three minutes shorter. Stress is what keeps people off bikes, so that's what Kickstand avoids.
Built for Chicago
Its grid, its diagonal streets and six-way junctions, its side-street greenways, its lakefront. Local quirks get local rules, like the painted lanes on Roosevelt or the cobblestones on Fulton Market.
Honest about the data
Every route comes with the reasons: how much is car-free, how much is in traffic, which crossings have no light. When the data is shaky, it says so.
Reading the map
Every bike route in the city is drawn by how much it separates you from cars. Greener and thicker means more separation.
Trail
Off the street entirely, like the Lakefront Trail or the 606. No cars at all.
Protected lane
A curb, posts or parked cars between you and traffic. The next best thing to a trail.
Neighborhood greenway
A quiet side street set up for bikes, with speed humps and signed crossings. You share it with a few slow cars.
Buffered lane
Paint, with a striped gap between you and traffic. Better than a line, but nothing physical.
Bike lane
A painted line and nothing else. Fine on a quiet street, nerve-racking next to fast traffic.
Shared lane
Bike symbols painted on the road. You ride in the traffic lane with the cars; on a busy street it counts as no lane at all.
How a route is chosen
Kickstand gives every block of every street a score for how stressful it is to ride, then searches for the route where the scores add up to the least. Short and stressful loses to a little longer and calm.
One mile here feels like…
…this many miles of trail, to the Calm option. The router uses these to compare any two ways of getting somewhere.
So Calm would ride three and a half miles of trail rather than one mile of paint beside heavy traffic, and goes a long way round to avoid a busy street with no lane at all.
What makes a street stressful
For streets without a barrier, Kickstand combines four things, from city traffic counts and OpenStreetMap.
Traffic
Vehicles a day, from about 800 city cameras.
Speed
The limit: 25 mph on a side street is as easy as riding with traffic gets.
Width
Lanes to cross: four lanes of traffic is a different world from two.
Separation
Paint takes some of the stress away. A barrier takes nearly all of it.
Corners count
A great lane doesn't help if the turn off it is terrifying. Kickstand tracks which way you're facing, so it prices every turn and crossing as well as every block. Whether there's a traffic light changes a lot.
Turning with traffic
Usually a right, light or not. You stay on your side of the street. It costs a little more where traffic is heavy.
Turning across traffic, no light
Usually a left: you wait for a gap and cut across oncoming cars. On a busy street, routes go a long way to avoid this.
Turning across traffic, at a light
You can cross like a pedestrian, one crosswalk at a time with the light, so it's far easier. It still costs more at big, busy junctions, where that means two long crossings and a wait for the next light.
Six-way junctions, even with a light
Chicago's diagonal streets make plenty: longer crossings, cars from more directions. Each extra street meeting there costs more, even at a light.
Dropped into traffic
When protection ends and you merge into cars, that costs too, so one continuous calm stretch beats a patchwork.
Known danger spots
Junctions and stretches local riders know are bad, like Roosevelt at Canal, are marked with brown dots and steered around.
Three ways to ride
The same scoring, with three temperaments. None of them is a car route: all three stay off busy streets with no bike lane. They differ in how far they'll go for more protection.
When two of them agree, Kickstand looks for genuinely different alternatives instead of showing the same route twice, so you usually get three real choices.
Bring what you know
Data can't see everything. Two ways to put your own knowledge in.
Local notes
Mark a stretch or junction as rough, crowded, stop-and-go or dangerous, even just at certain hours, and routes steer around it. Notes show as brown dotted lines.
Draw your own route
Tap along the streets you'd ride, and Kickstand checks it like any other: how much is calm, where the traffic is, which turns are hard, and how it compares with its own best route.
Where it comes from
All public data, rebuilt into one map of Chicago's streets. Nothing about you is sent anywhere: routes are worked out on your own phone or computer.
What it can't know
"Calm" isn't a promise of "safe". These are the gaps worth knowing.
- Crash counts aren't danger ratings. Busy bike streets have more crashes partly because more people ride them, so crashes only nudge routes a little.
- Traffic counts cover the big streets. Side streets and many collectors use typical numbers for their kind of road.
- "Protected" covers a lot. A concrete curb and a row of flexible posts both count, though they feel different.
- Stop signs are only partly mapped. Where they are, an all-way stop counts as easier and a two-way stop as harder for whoever stops, but most side-street junctions have none mapped, so they're treated as unknown.
- Theft locations are rough. Reports are placed to within about a kilometre, so hotspots show neighbourhoods, not corners.
- Streets change. Construction, new lanes and potholes show up in the data slowly. Ride by what you see.
Questions about a route? Draw the one you'd take and see how it compares. Kickstand will show you its reasons.
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