LiW · Linda into the World
Routes where motorways, expressways and ring roads simply don't exist — verified metre by metre.
Ordinary sat navs treat the motorway as a preference: when it pays off, sooner or later they take you there. LiW removes it from the map. And it removes ring roads and expressways too. Travel the best your region has to offer: the landscapes of small towns and villages, local shops and businesses.
Two characters of travel
La Diretta goes straight to the point, on ordinary roads.
La Quieta picks the gentlest way round: smaller, quieter roads, the ones that run through villages and along the vineyards. You see the true minutes of both, and you decide what kind of trip today is.
Guidance that reassures
The voice speaks only when needed. No red traffic to unsettle you, no alarms: simple directions, in good time, on roads where you can always pull over.
CarPlay and Android Auto
LiW rides along with CarPlay and Android Auto: the map on your car's display, your phone in your pocket. And if the trip is interrupted, it resumes right where you left off.
The LiW button
The roadworks that have dragged on for months, the junction that unsettles you, the descent that turns to ice in winter, the road where that one time it went badly: a map cannot know these things. You can.
That is why there is one button while you drive, always under your thumb and on the car’s display too. You press it as you go through, and LiW sets that stretch aside.
And you can go back. The roads you set aside stay in a list, with the day you said goodbye to them: whenever you like you let them back in with one tap, from your phone and from the car’s display.
About one kilometre of Via Gardesana from here on. Today’s trip stays as it is: LiW will avoid it from the next ones.
Before setting anything aside, LiW asks. Always, in the car too.
LiW Don’t Enter
A special feature: sometimes it isn’t the whole trip that worries you, it’s one exact spot: the slip road climbing towards the expressway or the ring road, a fork that would take you onto a road you would never drive!
LiW never takes you onto those roads, the route is worked out without them. But before you set off, on your phone, you can see where your road brushes past them: tap the marker and the junction opens up, with the ramp you must not take and a photo of how it really looks.
Only an entrance that starts from your own road is marked, at the very junction you will drive through: a ramp passing twenty metres away but starting elsewhere is not your fork, and telling you about it would be an alarm for a manoeuvre you cannot make.
Three different ways of wanting the same road.
The one with villages and vineyards, bars on the square and slow hairpins. For those for whom the journey is not the time between two toll booths.
Motorways and ring roads make you anxious: fast lanes, no exits, nowhere to stop. LiW only takes you on roads where you can always pull over.
Mopeds, microcars, Apes, tractors, slow classic cars: vehicles that simply aren't allowed there. LiW only calculates routes where your vehicle is at home.
Private beta
LiW is still being tested, and testing means little when the same people keep driving the same roads. We are looking for people who drive elsewhere, who have a car that shows directions on the instrument display too, who have an Android.
Places are few: the beta is private, and every extra person is another journey to follow. Applying does not mean getting an invitation, and those left out now are not ruled out: we keep them for the next round.
Use it at least twice a week, and tell us when something goes wrong. Every comment matters to us, and is worth more than ten compliments.
When LiW launches, everyone who helped receives a code to use it free of charge.
By filling in the form at the bottom of this page. The beta is private and you get in by invitation: we are looking above all for people who do not feel up to motorways, ring roads and expressways, and for those who drive vehicles that are not allowed there at all. Places are few, and applying does not mean getting the invitation straight away: whoever stays out now, we keep for the next round. Of those who get in we ask that they use it and tell us when something is wrong, and when LiW comes out everyone who helped receives a code to have it for free.
In ordinary sat navs “avoid” is a preference that can give way, and it only covers motorways. LiW never takes you onto motorways, ring roads or expressways! Its claim “0 km on motorways and expressways” is real.
Because on local roads, whether you travel for pleasure or for work, the pace is slower: you feel that this time has meaning too, you feel less anxious, and the destination is only the last part of your journey.
All over Italy, Austria and Switzerland, village by village. In Austria and Switzerland, avoiding the motorway also means not buying the vignette. Other countries will come calmly, as they should.
It depends on the journey, and less than people fear. On short trips, in town and nearby, often nothing changes: traffic lights and roundabouts count for more than toll booths. On long journeys the difference shows, and that is the honest part of the deal: LiW does not sell you the shortcut, it sells you the road you can actually drive. You see the estimated time before you set off, on the route preview, and you decide.
Amaxophobia is the fear of driving, and it doesn’t come in one shape only: some people are fine in town and freeze at the motorway entrance, some can’t stand tunnels, bridges or queues, some fear being left without exits or going too far from home, some stopped after a crash and some couldn’t say when it started. It often brings panic attacks with it, and the anxiety of the days before a trip.
It is a wide territory, and nobody can map it from the outside: two people using the same word may be describing very different things.
So let’s say it plainly: LiW does not cure, it is not a therapy and it replaces nobody. Someone with amaxophobia finds help in a specialist, not in an app.
What LiW can do is take away one part of the problem, when that part is the road: if what stops you are motorways, expressways and ring roads, LiW gets you there without ever going near them, and before you leave it shows you the whole trip, with the delicate spots. For some people that is the difference between giving up and going. For others it won’t be enough, and it’s only fair to say so.
Yes, and that is one of the reasons it exists. Mopeds, microcars, light quadricycles, farm vehicles and in general anything not allowed on motorways need a route that never sends them there. Other sat navs suggest it anyway and leave you facing the no-entry sign: LiW does not, because it never uses those roads at all.
You need one to work out the route: the road is drawn by our engine, which lives on a server. Once you are on your way, if the connection drops the guidance carries on along the route already calculated, and we say so with one line on screen, without alarms. What you lose without a connection is recalculation, if you leave the route, and searching for a new address.
No: it turns the music down for as long as the sentence lasts, then the music comes back to its own volume. A podcast or an audiobook is paused and resumes by itself, because words over words cannot be understood. And the voice can be switched off with one tap, from the car’s display too.
Because on the roads it takes, traffic matters less than you would think: real queues are almost always on ring roads and motorways, which is exactly where LiW does not go. The times you read are worked out on the road, not on the traffic of the moment: take them as an honest indication, not as a promise to the minute.
An iPhone with iOS 17 or newer, or an Android phone with Android 10 or newer. In the car LiW appears on the dashboard screen: CarPlay on iPhone, Android Auto on Android.
From OpenStreetMap, the free map that hundreds of thousands of people build all over the world. On that data we built the routing engine, teaching it never to use motorways, expressways or ring roads. The map you see on screen comes from OpenFreeMap on Android and from Apple on iPhone. © OpenStreetMap contributors: without their patient work, LiW would not exist.
It stays on your phone. While you drive it never leaves it: we do not transmit it and we do not record it. When you ask for a route, only the starting point and the destination reach our engine, with nothing that says who you are, and they are not kept. The places you save, Home, Work and your favourites, stay on the phone as well.
LiW will be a paid app, with a yearly subscription. We will announce the price when the app launches: we would rather say it once and say it right, than write it now and change it later. Those helping us test it will know first.
No. Download and go. Your places stay on your phone.
It happens, and nothing happens: LiW recalculates at once and the route resumes from the nearest ordinary roads. No scolding.
Nothing irreparable happens. Before setting a stretch aside LiW asks you, and the trip in progress does not change anyway. The roads you set aside stay in a list: you let them back in with one tap, from your phone or from the car’s display.
Linda’s story
The fear of driving cannot be talked out of you.
Mine is an irrational fear, hard to explain: motorways, ring roads, multi-lane roads, big roundabouts. Ordinary places for many people, yet able to make me feel suddenly small, motionless and defenceless.
So fear has often chosen the roads for me. Even for a few kilometres I set the sat nav again and again, I add stops, I look for routes I consider safe. It does not always work: sometimes I have taken the wrong road and found myself crying on the phone, asking for help.
For years I asked sat navs for something they could not give me. “Avoid motorways” was not enough: there were still the ring roads, the many-laned roads, the big roundabouts, and all those routes that are normal for everyone else but can become a boundary for me.
Then, instead of asking me once more to adapt to the roads, someone imagined roads that could adapt to me. That is how LiW was born.
I hope this outstretched hand can reach many other people: those who are afraid of driving, those who travel on a moped, those who avoid certain roads, or those who simply wish to move at a different pace, slower and more human.
LiW does not erase the fear. But it can make it less lonely, and open a road exactly where there seemed to be none.
LindaLiW carries her name: Linda into the World.
LiW will be a paid app with a yearly subscription: we will announce the price at launch. Today it is in private beta on iPhone and Android, and we are looking for people to help us test it.
Today in beta on iPhone
