Better bike routes for real city life
We're building a navigation app that helps more people choose the bike, by making city rides easier to follow and more comfortable to ride, with honest trade-offs.
The problem with the shortest route
Most navigation apps optimise for distance or time. For urban cyclists, the shortest route isn't always the best ride. It can mean a turn every two hundred metres, a red light at every corner, a cobblestone shortcut and a dark stretch behind the station. The attention a route demands is as real a cost as its length, and nobody has been counting it.
Shortest route
5.8 km · 24 min
- 17 turns
- 11 traffic lights
- +72 m climbing
Comfort route
6.5 km · 25 min
- 5 turns
- 4 traffic lights
- +31 m climbing
A more comfortable route gets more people on bikes.
Some riders will accept a route 10 to 20 percent longer than the shortest one when it has clearly fewer turns, fewer interruptions, less climbing, smoother surfaces, or better lighting after dark. We believe this; we have not proven it. The Berlin pilot exists to find out, with one question after every ride: would you ride this route again? If riders say no, Spokli changes, not the question.
Our principles
Four principles guide everything we do.
Legal and rideable first
Access rules, closures, one-way streets and your hard avoids constrain every route before any comfort is weighed. A straight, well-lit arterial never wins just because it has fewer turns.
Comfort within a budget
Extra distance is acceptable only within a disclosed tolerance, and both deltas are shown. A very long detour is not automatically better because it is flat.
Evidence before precision
Unknown surface or lighting is its own state, never a favourable default. Estimates are labelled as estimates. A number we cannot stand behind is not shown.
Attention is scarce
Voice first, long quiet stretches, calm recovery after a wrong turn. Nothing on the screen asks for your eyes while you ride.
What Spokli is not
- Not a fitness trackerWe don't track your workouts, performance or health metrics.
- Not a social networkThere are no public profiles, leaderboards or activity feeds.
- Not a promise of the safest routeWe do not promise exact brightness on every street or live traffic-light timing.
- Not a replacement for your own judgementSpokli helps you find better options; you always decide what feels right.
Your data stays yours
No account. Your location is used while you plan and ride and is not uploaded. This website sets no cookies and runs no tracking. The privacy policy is short enough to read.
- Minimal data collection
- No tracking across other sites
- No data sharing or selling
- Anonymous ride statistics are a separate opt-in
Who builds Spokli
Spokli is independent and made in Berlin by people who commute by bike and got tired of routes that were short on paper and long on red lights. The routing runs on open data and open-source foundations: OpenStreetMap, the city's open data, the GraphHopper routing engine. We ride the routes we ship, and our testers tell us where we are wrong.
Help us build better bike routes for real cities.
Join the waitlist to be the first to try Spokli when it launches in Berlin.