A route is a promise
about a place you haven't reached.
Most planners make that promise the moment you press go. Byway checks it against the hour you'd actually get there — whether the door is open, whether the light is gone, whether the view will be there at all.
Nothing here is simulated.
One plan, built by the engine against live roads, live places and a live forecast, then recorded. Every pin, every verdict and every reason below came out of that run.
The quickest line between the two points. Almost nothing worth stopping for happens on it.
The run, as a list
Kept
- 1Flat Iron Statuenode/12992010968
- 2Smathers Viewnode/357803699
- 3Shook Museumnode/7221111326
- 4Jerry Knobnode/357807821
- 5Chief Junaluskanode/7805384256
- 6Killian Knobnode/357807891
- 7Wheels Through Time Motorcycle Museumway/342877783
- 8Ghost Town Villageway/1092172492
- 9Soco Craft & Tower Incnode/10723640152
- 10Soco Falls Overlookway/1114700330
- 11Mandara Spa Harrah's Cherokee Casino Resortnode/9959206564
Turned down
- 16The weather at your arrival
low visibility at your arrival — the view won't show
Billie Top · Grassy Top · Thompson Knob · Sheep Top · Chestnut Mountain · Sidney Top · Little Piney Top · Millstone Mountain · Little Sam Mountain · Jump Off · Anderson Mountain · Marion Top · Chambers Mountain · Hyder Mountain · Plott Balsam Overlook (MP 457.9) · Carter Top
- 45Didn't earn the detour
The door has to be open when you get there.
A stop is only good at the hour you reach it. The engine works out when you'd arrive at each place — not one midpoint for the whole drive, but a range for that particular stop — then checks it against that window. What fails across the whole range doesn't make the list.
- Opening hours, at your hour
- Read from the place's own record and evaluated for the window you'd be standing there. A museum that shuts at four is not a four-thirty stop.
- The forecast where you'll stand
- Hourly, at the stop's own coordinates, for the hour you'd arrive. An overlook in fog is not a view, and the engine says so rather than sending you.
- Light, not just time
- Sunrise and sunset are computed for that latitude on that day — which is why this works the same in Patagonia as in Norway.
Every stop is somewhere real.
Each place the engine can offer already existed in the public map before Byway saw it. Candidates carry that identity through the whole pipeline, and whatever orders your day can only choose from that list — never add to it. Zero hallucinations.
- Traced, not generated
- Every candidate carries its OpenStreetMap id. Take any stop on this page, look it up, and you'll find the same place.
- It orders. It never invents.
- When a language model sequences the day, it may only reorder the list it was handed. An id it makes up is dropped, and if it fails outright a deterministic ordering answers instead.
- The story stays inside the facts
- What you hear at a stop is written from that place's verified fields and its own attributed encyclopedia extract. It can compress what it was given. It cannot go past it.
It knows the good roads and finds the rest.
Byway carries its own corpus of verified places, and the scenic roads worth reaching them by — the designated byway record, plus signed routes beyond it. Where a corridor turns out to be thin, the engine reads the public map while you plan and keeps what it can verify.
- It prefers the beautiful line
- Given more than one way between two stops, the engine will spend part of your time on the better road rather than the faster one.
- A thin corridor isn't an empty one
- Where the corpus is sparse, it queries the public map as you plan — so a road nobody has driven for you yet still gets a real answer.
- When the day won't fit, it repairs
- If the drive runs past the time you have, the engine substitutes or drops stops until it fits — and tells you what it cost, instead of quietly handing back a day you can't finish.
A different journey for every traveler.
Some travelers want waterfalls and mountain passes. Others want architecture, local food, hidden beaches, quiet towns. Byway shapes the drive around what matters to you — and it sharpens as you pick routes and linger at stops. Six signals go into every road it hands back. Yours comes first.
Your taste.
A preference vector that learns from every trip you start and every stop you linger on. Quiet, not creepy.
Verified places.
433,000+ places, each traced to a real record before it ships. Zero hallucinations.
Live weather.
Redraws the day when the forecast moves. Not seasonal averages — minute-by-minute.
Operating hours.
Resequences stops so you arrive when places are actually open. No closed-on-Tuesday museums.
Local community.
When locals vouch, it counts most — Anini Beach made a Kauaʻi day because 47 locals backed it. Locals weighted first.
Companion drive.
Every route opens in Google Maps, one tap — beside you, never captive. Our own turn-by-turn is coming.
The same engine, wherever you ask it.
There is one engine. Every way in asks it the same question and gets the same answer back.
In the browser
Plan, edit and drive on the web, free while Byway is in beta.
In the car
Turn-by-turn with narration on iOS and Android, arriving with the private beta.
Inside your assistant
Byway is a tool ChatGPT and Claude can use — searching real routes and planning real drives, not describing them from memory.
Give it a day and see.
The engine is easiest to trust once it has planned something you already know. Pick a road you've driven and watch what it does with it.