RILY: The app making cycling safer in Catalonia, and beyond

A new application called RILY offers a safer way of experiencing cycling, allowing people to enjoy every ride while reducing risks on the road as much as possible. RILY gives cyclists all the information they need to make informed decisions before choosing a route. A new way to plan rides and enjoy the journey even more.

RILY was born out of a very personal need, explain its Catalan co-founders Jaume Busquet and Aleix Grífol. “We love discovering new routes, but we often set off without knowing what awaited us, be it a closed road, a tunnel, roadworks, or a section with heavy traffic. We kept asking ourselves the same question: how is it possible that today we have so much information about sports performance, yet we still don’t have safety information before heading out on a ride?”

Over time the founders realised it wasn’t just their own concern, but a need shared by many other cyclists. Busquet explains: “We interviewed nearly 100 people, and the results surprised us. More than 80% considered it very important to know the level of risk on a route before riding, while 44% had experienced a safety issue due to a lack of information.”

RILY

The new application automatically analyses every coordinate of a route, detecting all potential hazards for the cyclist and calculating a risk score from 1 to 5. Level 1 represents a safe route with favourable conditions, while level 5 indicates a route with potential risks and is not recommended.

“To calculate this score we combine several variables, including the type of road and its characteristics, the surface type, and weather conditions,” explains Grífol. “In addition, RILY integrates official real-time traffic information from the Catalan Traffic Service (Servei Català de Trànsit), Spain’s Directorate-General for Traffic (Dirección General de Tráfico), Andorra Mobility, and Bison Futé in France.”

RILY is able to detect when a planned route passes through sections with heavy traffic, road incidents, roadworks, tunnels, or unpaved surfaces that could compromise the cyclist’s safety or comfort. In these cases, the app proposes an alternative route for the dangerous section that avoids these problematic areas.

The Catalan co-founders sum it up as follows: “Many users appreciate being able to discover alternatives to dangerous sections, because an extra five minutes is often worth it if it allows you to ride with much greater peace of mind and confidence.”

Busquet and Grífol want to make RILY a leading platform for road safety in cycling. “We are currently working on an automatic route planner designed to create safer routes from scratch. At the moment, RILY operates across Catalonia, Spain, Andorra, and France, but our goal is to expand coverage to more European countries. At the same time, we are developing B2B solutions for hotels, cycling destinations, and public authorities that want to identify, certify, and promote safer cycling routes.”

“RILY is especially useful when riding in unfamiliar areas, where reducing risks as much as possible becomes even more important. In that sense, we are not simply creating another route-planning app. Our goal is to give cyclists the information that we ourselves would have wanted to have before every ride.”