A walking map · live in central Paris
Everyone's walking a different city.
Every map gives you the same route as everyone else: the fastest one. Waylight is a walking map that asks what matters to you first — shade, light, quiet, or step-free ground — and builds the route around that instead of the clock.
- Shade
- Light
- Quiet
- Step-free
Illustrated for Waylight — the same street, three people, three different needs.
Léa · the crèche run, 8:40am
Léa doesn't want the fastest way. She wants the shaded one.
Every morning she pushes a stroller to daycare. The fastest route crosses three curbs with no dropped kerb, in full sun. Léa set her priorities to shade and step-free once, in the app — now every route there avoids both automatically, as the sun moves through the day.
Shade updates hour by hour, calculated from real building heights and the sun's position — not guessed, and you can flag it when it's wrong.
Nadia · walking home, 1:15am
Nadia doesn't want the fastest way home. She wants the lit one.
After a night shift, the fastest route home cuts past an empty rail yard. Nadia set well-lit and populated as what matters most after dark. Waylight routes her past the streetlamps, a bakery still lit for the morning bread, people still out — six minutes longer, worth it every time.
Odette · Sunday walk, week 3
Odette doesn't want the fastest way. She wants the one she can actually walk.
Her physiotherapist told her to walk every day. The fastest route to the market has two flights of stairs and broken pavement. Odette set flat and quiet once — now every route finds her the level path, with a bench along the way if she needs to stop.
Rue Cler → Musée d'Orsay
Same 23 minutes. A completely different walk.
This is a real comparison from the running prototype, not a mockup: the same walk from Rue Cler to the Musée d'Orsay, recalculated once you tell it what matters.
The quickest way
23min
The Waylight way · set to "lit + quiet"
23min
4
things you can weigh — shade, light, quiet, step-free — reweighed into every route, live
95%
of Paris trips under 3 km are already made on foot. The walking city exists; it never had a map that adapted to it
Shade draws on real building heights and solar geometry; lighting draws on the City of Paris's public streetlight register. MIT Media Lab's Place Pulse project showed a street's felt comfort can be predicted at city-block scale — research still active and cited in 2026. Waylight turns inputs like these into a route you can use tonight.
· Home
Why I keep taking the longer way home.
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. It's not just my question. It's Léa's, and Nadia's, and Odette's — everyone's, asked a little differently.
Walking is the oldest way to move through a city. It deserves a map that treats it like one.
— Ines, building Waylight in Paris
Tomorrow · your city?
Walk with us.
Waylight is live in central Paris today and expanding block by block across Europe. Try the prototype now, or leave your email and we'll tell you when it reaches your city.