This map could make every weekend drive much, much better.
Break out your Pilotis and driving gloves because a new map app lets you find the twistiest roads in both your area and the rest of the world. It’s called Curvature and it’s like Waze for gearheads, by providing a color-coordinated map of the absolute best mobbing roads on the planet.
The map is pretty simple to use, with every twisty road colored from yellow, to red, to pink. Yellow roads are mildly curvy and barely any fun but they’re better than straight roads. Pink roads are very twisty, with more time spent driving through corners than straights. And red roads are somewhere in between. If you zoom in and click on a road, you can also see a detailed breakdown of each of the road’s sections. Each section is given a numeric “curvature value,” between zero and 10,000, that shows you exactly how twisty and fun it is. Any road below 300 is pretty boring but a 10,000-rated road is absolutely epic.
Curvature
Taking a look at the United States, epic driving roads are found mostly on the coasts, with very little in between. It seems that the best states for killer driving roads are the Virginias, the Carolinas, and, unsurprisingly, California. There are some splatterings of pink in Colorado and Utah, home to some of the best mountain roads in the country, but very little outside of that.
However, according to Curvature, the best two places in the world for driving enthusiasts to live are Italy and Japan, as both countries are almost completely painted pink. Most countries on the Mediterranean have some epic sections, though, as do Mexico, Peru, and much of China.
Curvature uses data sourced from OpenStreetMap, a community-driven mapping project, and a propriety road-curvature algorithm to determine which roads are the most fun to drive. There’s a complete breakdown of how it works and how the algorithm finds the most exciting roads in the world.
Naturally, I took a look at my home state of New Jersey to find the best driving roads near me. It’s a good thing I own neither a pair of Pilotis nor driving gloves because the Garden State looks barron. Though having unsuccessfully searched for great driving roads for more than a decade, I knew that already. Hopefully, you live in a pinker area than I do and can discover some great new roads for your driving pleasure using this map.
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