A curated, interactive map of Northern California's best driving roads — touge-style scenic and technical routes hand-picked from UC Berkeley.
Live site: justinsuo.github.io/tougespot-in-norcal
Nine routes across the Bay Area, with the actual road geometry traced via OSRM (not just point markers):
| Route | Region | Rating |
|---|---|---|
| Mount Hamilton via Quimby | South Bay | 4.5 |
| Silverado Trail | North Bay | 4.5 |
| Redwood Road | East Bay | 4.0 |
| Skyline Boulevard (CA-35) | Peninsula | 4.0 |
| Panoramic Highway | North Bay | 4.0 |
| Napa–Lake Berryessa Loop | North Bay | 4.0 |
| Mines Road | East Bay | 4.0 |
| Highway 9 (Boulder Creek) | South Bay | 3.5 |
| Palomares Road | East Bay | 3.5 |
Each route shows length, drive time, drive time from UC Berkeley, the kind of road, when to go, and what to watch out for.
- Real road polylines — routes are traced along actual pavement using the OSRM routing API, with a 7-day localStorage cache so repeat visits are instant.
- Filters — minimum rating, region, and a personal-runs heatmap toggle.
- Detail panel — per-route photo, length, drive time, round-trip time from Berkeley, when to go, and what to look out for.
- Heatmap of personal runs — drop your own GPX exports into
gpx/and the app overlays them as a Strava-style heatmap. - Mobile-friendly — sidebar collapses into a bottom drawer on small screens.
- Static site — pure HTML/CSS/JS, hosted on GitHub Pages, no backend needed.
Two ways:
- Open an issue with the new-route template — fastest if you don't want to mess with JSON.
- Open a pull request that adds an entry to
routes.json— see CONTRIBUTING.md.
Routes are scored on a 1–5 scale across pavement quality, technicality, scenery, traffic, and "would you bring a friend." See CONTRIBUTING.md for the rubric.
git clone https://github.com/justinsuo/tougespot-in-norcal.git
cd tougespot-in-norcal
python3 -m http.server 8765
open http://localhost:8765That's it — no build step, no dependencies.
- Leaflet for the map
- Leaflet.heat for the heatmap layer
- OSRM public demo server for road geometry
- CARTO Dark basemap tiles
- GitHub Pages for hosting
Routes data and content: CC BY 4.0. Code: MIT.