What you can do

A planning aid built for families, riders, and neighbors

Everything is free and runs in your browser. No account is required — an optional email sign-in simply saves your routes.

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Explore the stress map

Color-coded traffic stress for the whole state, with layers for traffic volume, crash history, and hills. Zoom to your county and see your streets the way a cautious rider does.

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Plan a low-stress route

Pick two places — home to school, house to park — and compare the safest, balanced, and most direct options, with hill avoidance and clear warnings where you must cross a busy road.

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Log the trips you want

Record rides you take, or wish you could take. Start points are stored approximately — never your exact house. Together these become your community's case for safer crossings.

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Add paths the map missed

Draw the shortcut you actually ride. Submissions are reviewed, and confirmed paths start appearing in everyone's routes.

The method

Traffic stress, scored the way agencies score it

Every segment receives a bicycle Level of Traffic Stress (LTS) rating from posted and observed speeds, lane counts, and bike facilities — the same Montgomery County / Mineta-lineage method used in professional bicycle network plans, applied to OpenStreetMap data enriched with WisDOT traffic counts and statewide crash records.

LTS 1calm — most kids

LTS 2most adults

LTS 3confident riders

LTS 4high stress

LTS 5extreme — not recommended

Full write-up: how routes and stress scores are computed (PDF).

Honest limits: this is a planning-level screening aid, not a guarantee of safety. Scores come from mapped data, which can be incomplete or out of date, and low crash counts do not mean a road is safe. Verify conditions in person and use your own judgment.

How a trip becomes change

From one ride to a safer street

Ride — or wish you could

You log a trip you take, or one you'd take if it felt safe. It takes about a minute.

Evidence accumulates

Trips pool into a community record: "families here want to reach this park, and they're all forced across the same crossing."

The case gets made

That record, paired with the stress map and crash history, is what local governments need to justify and fund fixes — crossings, paths, calmer streets.

Local knowledge matters most where data is thinnest: many of the safest routes depend on neighborhood cut-throughs no public dataset records. If you know one, add it in the app.

About the project

Built by a Wisconsin traffic-safety engineer — and a dad of four

Eric Youngblom, PE Licensed Professional Engineer (WI) B.S. & M.S. Civil Engineering, UW–Milwaukee 15+ years in transportation

I'm a traffic and safety engineer, a Washington County resident, and a father of four. I built this site to help my own family — and everyone across Wisconsin — find safe, low-stress bike routes, and to give communities real evidence for making biking safer.

My career has centered on exactly what this site runs on: traffic safety analysis, transportation modeling, and turning large public datasets into decisions agencies can act on. The methods used here — Level of Traffic Stress, FHWA crossing guidance, AASHTO sight-distance criteria — are the same ones used in professional practice, documented in the methodology write-up.

This is a personal project. The goal is simple: put practical, planning-level safety analysis in the hands of the parents and riders who actually use these roads — and use what they contribute to start real conversations with local and state officials about making biking safer for everyone in Wisconsin.

Questions, corrections, or press: eric@bikesafewi.com

For communities & local officials

See what this data says about your community

If you serve a village, city, school district, or county — on staff, a plan commission, or a bike/ped committee — the map and its community record can directly support your planning work:

Safe Routes to School conversations and applications
Comprehensive-plan and bike/ped-plan elements
Grant applications (TAP, SRTS, HSIP) backed by demand evidence
Spotting the low-cost moment: fixing a crossing when a road project is already coming

Free walk-through

I'll walk you through what the data shows about your community — the stress map, where residents are asking to ride, and the crossings standing in the way. No cost; I built this to be useful.

Email eric@bikesafewi.com

Where is it actually safe to bike in your community?