What does the Brakeaway API return?

A 0–100 safety confidence score for a cycling route, plus a band label, distance in miles, the number of segments analyzed, and the percentage of the route on protected paths, painted lanes, and busy roads. The response is informational data about infrastructure, not a recommendation to ride a route.

What data is the bike route score based on?

OpenStreetMap cycling infrastructure — protected paths, painted bike lanes, road classification, surface quality — sampled per route segment. It is the same scoring engine that powers brakeaway.bike and the Strava integration, so API scores match what the website shows for the same route.

How do I authenticate with the Brakeaway API?

Send your key as an HTTP bearer token: Authorization: Bearer . Keys are issued per organization and metered per calendar month in UTC.

Can I send a GPX file directly to the API?

Yes. POST the raw GPX as the request body with any content type, or send JSON with a coordinates array of [lat, lon] pairs. Routes may contain 2 to 50,000 points and cover 0.02 to 300 miles.

Is there a free tier for the bike route safety API?

Yes. Evaluation keys include 1,000 calls per calendar month at no cost, which is enough to prototype and benchmark against your own routes. Higher volumes are quoted per partner.

Bike Route Safety API

One POST, one number. Send a GPX file or a list of coordinates, get back a 0–100 safety confidence score describing the cycling infrastructure along that route — no map, no UI, no user account.

Brakeaway's scoring API exposes the same engine that powers the public route analyzer and the Strava integration. If your product has a bike route in it — a planner, a fleet tool, a real-estate or urban-analytics dashboard, a delivery router — this turns that route into a number you can sort, filter, threshold, or display, grounded in real OpenStreetMap cycling infrastructure rather than a guess.

Request an API key

Endpoint

POST https://brakeaway.bike/api/v1/score
Authorization: Bearer <your API key>

Sending a route

Two accepted body formats. Raw GPX, with any content type:

curl -X POST https://brakeaway.bike/api/v1/score \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer bk_live_..." \
  --data-binary @route.gpx

Or JSON coordinates as [lat, lon] pairs, with an optional matching elevations array in meters:

curl -X POST https://brakeaway.bike/api/v1/score \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer bk_live_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"coordinates": [[41.878, -87.63], [41.882, -87.63]]}'

Routes may carry 2 to 50,000 points and span 0.02 to 300 miles.

What comes back

{
  "score": 46,
  "band": "Caution",
  "distance_miles": 21.42,
  "segments_analyzed": 21,
  "protected_pct": 0,
  "painted_pct": 10,
  "busy_road_pct": 67,
  "partial": false,
  "disclosure": "Informational only — not a substitute for local judgment. Verify conditions before you ride.",
  "terms": "https://brakeaway.bike/liability#8-api-and-third-party-integrations"
}

Field	Meaning
`score`	0–100, higher is better. The average of per-mile segment scores, minus a busy-road penalty.
`band`	The human-readable label for the score. See the band table below.
`distance_miles`	Total route distance as measured from the submitted geometry.
`segments_analyzed`	How many per-mile segments contributed to the score.
`protected_pct`	Share of the route on physically separated paths.
`painted_pct`	Share on painted bike lanes with no physical separation.
`busy_road_pct`	Share on roads classified as busy, with no cycling provision.
`partial`	If `true`, OpenStreetMap was unreachable and the score fell back to defaults. Treat the score as unusable and retry later.
`disclosure`	Required display string — see below. Always present.
`terms`	Link to the governing terms for API use. Always present.
`usage`	Optional. `{used, limit}` for this key in the current UTC calendar month. Omitted entirely when metering is unavailable — usage metering fails open so a counter outage never blocks scoring. Guard your access: `body.usage?.used`.

Score bands

Score	Band
90–100	Very High Confidence
75–89	High Confidence
60–74	Moderate
45–59	Caution
30–44	Risky
15–29	Unsafe
0–14	Extremely Dangerous

Treat band as a closed set of exactly these seven strings. Parse defensively: new bands are not added without notice to existing partners, but an unrecognized value should degrade to displaying the numeric score rather than failing.

Display requirement. The disclosure string ships inside every response and must be shown at or near wherever you display the score, per Liability Disclosure §8.4. Scores are informational estimates about infrastructure. They are not recommendations, and they do not assert that any route is safe to ride.

Checking usage without spending a call

GET https://brakeaway.bike/api/v1/usage
Authorization: Bearer <your API key>

Returns {"used": 412, "limit": 1000, "month": "2026-09"} for your own key, and does not increment the counter.

Errors

Status	Meaning
`401`	Missing or invalid `Authorization: Bearer` key.
`400`	Unreadable or unrecognized body.
`422`	Route invalid — too few points, out-of-range coordinates, too long or too short.
`429`	Monthly call limit reached for this key. Resets the 1st, UTC.
`502`	Scoring failed server-side. Retry.

Latency

Latency scales with route length, because scoring issues roughly one OpenStreetMap query per 40 route miles. A 20-mile route typically returns in a few seconds; a century-length route can take a minute or more. If you are scoring very long routes or batch-processing a catalog, say so when you request a key — asynchronous scoring is on the roadmap and gets prioritized by real demand.

How scoring works

Every segment of the submitted route is matched against OpenStreetMap cycling infrastructure: physically protected paths, painted lanes, road classification, and surface quality. Segments are scored per mile and averaged, then a penalty is applied for distance spent on busy roads with no cycling provision. The engine is shared — the API, the website, and the Strava integration all import the same module, so a route scored through the API returns the same number the website shows.

For the full methodology, see What is a bike route safety score?

Getting a key

Keys are issued per organization. Evaluation keys include 1,000 calls per calendar month at no cost — enough to prototype and benchmark the scores against routes you already know. Higher volumes are quoted per partner.

Email with your use case and rough monthly volume, and mention whether your routes run long (50+ miles) or arrive in batches:

Request an API key

See the scores first

Every city page runs the same engine the API does — a fast way to sanity-check the output against streets you know before you write any code.

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API version v1 · Last updated September 24, 2026