Shadeway

Shadeway maps the coolest path through a city, helping people avoid heat and walk safer in a warming world.

Comment 3

Shadeway

Shade-aware navigation for safer, cooler walks through New York City.

Inspiration

Shadeway started with a simple question: during a peak-summer heatwave, why should walking a few blocks in your own city feel dangerous?

Watching extreme heatwaves sweep through cities over the past few years made one thing obvious: heat is not just uncomfortable: it is a real health risk. For older adults, pregnant people, people taking certain medications, and anyone relying on public transit, extreme heat can limit access to work, school, appointments, and daily errands.

As students walking and commuting through New York City every day, this hits close to home. Crossing wide concrete avenues with little or no cover can make a 10-minute walk completely exhausting. Yet major map apps still optimize strictly for speed, ignoring whether you are walking through pleasant shade or baking on open asphalt.

Shadeway is our fix: a navigation tool built around how a route actually feels.

What it does

Shadeway helps people find cooler, more comfortable walking routes through New York City.

Instead of treating every sidewalk the same, Shadeway calculates sun position and building shadows to show where shade is likely to be. Users enter a destination, compare sun exposure across different paths, and choose the route that helps keep them cooler.

By making invisible environmental factors clear at a glance, Shadeway makes traveling in extreme heat safer, smarter, and a lot less miserable.

How we built it

We built Shadeway as a fast, mobile-first web app designed for quick decisions on the street.

Our primary focus was turning complex environmental data into immediate visual choices. Nobody wants to decipher climate charts or sun matrices while standing on a hot sidewalk. With Shadeway, users can pull out their phone, glance at the map, understand their shade options in seconds, and start walking.

We optimized the experience around real urban movement:

  • Quick, glanceable route decisions
  • Dense New York City streets
  • Clear map-based visualizations
  • Smooth, one-handed mobile use

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest hurdle was handling dynamic, constantly changing conditions. Shade is not static—it shifts minute by minute based on building height, time of day, and street orientation.

We also had to strike the right balance between mathematical accuracy and interface simplicity. A deep thermal model is not useful if it slows down a phone or overwhelms the user, while a generic shade map is not accurate enough to support a meaningful decision.

Finally, rendering New York City’s dense architecture in real time required careful performance tuning so the app could stay smooth and responsive on mobile screens.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

  • Putting comfort first: Shifting navigation away from raw speed to prioritize physical wellbeing.
  • Solving a personal problem: Building a real, working tool for an issue we experience firsthand every summer in NYC.
  • Demystifying complex data: Turning solar and shade calculations into intuitive visual route choices.
  • Building for public good: Creating a practical tool that can help vulnerable pedestrians navigate extreme urban heat more safely.

What we learned

The shortest path is not always the best path. Saving two minutes is not worth taking a route with zero shade in 95-degree weather.

We also realized how localized urban heat really is. Temperature and comfort can change block by block, sidewalk by sidewalk. Most importantly, we learned that environmental data only creates real impact when it is presented simply enough for anyone to act on immediately.

What’s next for Shadeway

Shadeway started in New York, but urban heat affects cities everywhere. Next on our roadmap:

  • Expanding coverage: Bringing shade-aware routing to more heat-affected cities around the world.
  • Richer environmental layers: Incorporating tree canopies, public water fountains, cooling centers, and shaded transit connections.
  • Smarter route tradeoffs: Letting users set custom preferences—for example, choosing to walk four extra minutes for significantly more shade.
  • Community-driven design: Partnering with neighborhood groups and daily commuters to improve recommendations where heat hits hardest.

Our long-term goal is simple: make every city easier and safer to walk through as extreme heat becomes part of everyday life.

Built With

+ 3 more
Share this project:

Updates