What is hladom.com?

Most routing apps answer one question: what is the fastest way there? On a 35 °C afternoon that is the wrong question. hladom.com answers a different one — what is the most comfortable way there, on foot?

It prefers shaded streets and avoids climbing, accepting a longer walk so you arrive cool rather than wrung out. One slider sets how much detour you will accept, and the route changes with the hour you set, because the shade does.

Every route reports four things: how far, how long, how much you climb and descend, and what share of the walk is in shade. While you walk, it tracks your position and counts down how much is left — and how much of that is still in the sun.

Coverage: Belgrade, Novi Sad and Niš. Ask for a route outside them — or between two of them — and the app will say so rather than guess.

Where the data comes from

The sun is computed for your city's own latitude and the date and hour you pick, accurate to about half a degree. The streets come from OpenStreetMap.

The trees are measured. Canopy comes from Meta and WRI's global canopy-height map at roughly a metre per pixel — between a fifth and a quarter of each covered city sits under trees over 3 m. Both pavements are measured separately, because on a wide boulevard one side is shaded and the other is not.

The hills are measured too, from Copernicus elevation data. That matters more than it sounds: a shady detour that drops fifty metres and climbs back up is worse for sweating than a flat walk in the sun.

The buildings are real, their heights partly. Every footprint comes from OpenStreetMap, so shadows are cast from the actual shape and width of each street rather than an assumed canyon. Heights are another matter: OpenStreetMap records them for about a seventh of buildings in Belgrade and far fewer elsewhere, so the rest are estimated from their tagged neighbours — a local guess rather than one number for the whole city, because a tower block district and an old town are not the same height.

So a route's shade is computed from real geometry, with one estimated ingredient. Better height data is the next thing we want. (Stay tuned for v2.0.)

Free, no account, no ads. Your location is used to draw the map and plan your route and is not stored. We do count usage: a random number is kept in your browser so we can tell how many people use hladom.com rather than how many visits — it is not tied to you, not shared with anyone, and clearing your browser data removes it.