How Scootable plans scooter-legal routes

Scootable is a free live hobby tool for 50cc scooter and low-speed motorcycle riders. It maps which roads are likely legal to ride across New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, then plans A-to-B routes that try to stay within those state rules. This page explains what the colors mean, where the data comes from, how routing works, and where the map can still be wrong.

The four colors

Every road on the map is sorted into one of four buckets, based on its speed limit and the law where it sits.

• Green — rideable. Posted 35 mph or under. Legal for a 50cc and the core of the network. The bold green roads are the through-streets you’d actually take; the faint green ones are local and residential streets that fade in as you zoom.
• Amber — right at 35. Posted exactly 35. Legal, but zero margin on a little scooter — ride sharp.
• Orange — 36 to 49 mph. Here the two states split. New Jersey bars a low-speed motorcycle from any road posted above 35, so orange in NJ is technically off-limits for a 50cc. Pennsylvania has no speed cap for it, so orange in PA is legal, just fast. Either way it’s a road to think twice about.
• Grey — not legal. 50 mph and up, or a limited-access highway (a freeway, expressway, or on/off ramp). Off-limits on a scooter in both states.

The law, in one breath. A 50cc scooter is a “low-speed motorcycle.” New Jersey keeps it off roads posted above 35 mph. Pennsylvania sets no speed limit for it and only bars limited-access highways. That single difference is why the same orange road can be illegal on the Jersey side of the river and legal on the Pennsylvania side.

Where the data comes from

The road network comes from OpenStreetMap — the free, community-maintained map of the world — filtered down to New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania along the Delaware, rebuilt from fresh state extracts.

Each road needs a speed limit to be colored, and that comes from the best source available, in order:

• a posted speed sign recorded in OpenStreetMap;
• the official NJDOT or PennDOT speed record, where a road matches one;
• a hand-correction I’ve added where I know the real number;
• and, when none of those exist, a guess from the type of road — a residential street with no sign on file is assumed to be a slow local road.

Every road also gets stamped with the state it’s in (New Jersey or Pennsylvania) by checking its location against the real state boundary, so the map can apply the right rule. When you click a road, the popup tells you which of these sources its speed came from — a posted sign is a lot more trustworthy than a guess.

How the map loads

The whole two-state area is a lot of roads, and downloading all of them would make the map slow — especially on a phone. So Scootable only loads the part you’re looking at.

The map is cut into small tiles. As you pan and zoom, your browser fetches just the tiles in view (and a margin around them), stitches them together, and throws away the ones you’ve scrolled far away from. The colored roads you see and the road network the router uses are loaded the same way — a rolling window a few miles wide around wherever you are — which is what keeps it usable on a phone.

How “Can I get there?” works

Set a start and a destination (type an address, tap the map, or use your location), and Scootable answers a simple question: is there a legal way to get there on a scooter?

Under the hood it treats the road network as a graph — intersections as dots, the roads between them as links — and searches for the lowest-cost path, the same idea any routing app uses. Two roads only connect where they actually meet at an intersection; a bridge passing over a road doesn’t count as a junction, so the router won’t send you off an overpass onto the road beneath it.

What makes it a scooter router is the cost. Instead of pure distance, each road is weighted by how good it is for a 50cc:

• confirmed-slow green roads are cheapest — it prefers them;
• amber (right at 35) costs a bit more;
• orange (fast) is penalized heavily, so the router only uses it when there’s no calmer way;
• grey (off-limits) is excluded entirely.

So the recommended route leans toward quiet, legal roads even when that’s a little longer. If there’s no fully-legal route, Scootable doesn’t just give up — it finds the least-bad way through and marks the off-limits stretches in red so you can see exactly what’s blocking you. When there are genuinely different options, it offers a few and labels the honest trade-off between them (shorter vs. fewer fast roads), and it never calls a route “safer” if it isn’t.

There’s also a low-speed vehicle toggle. With it on (the default), the router treats NJ’s over-35 roads as off-limits, matching the letter of the law for a 50cc. Turn it off and it’ll route over them as merely “fast” — useful if you’re on something that’s allowed up there.

Distances and times are estimates from speed limits — not live traffic.

What it can’t do

This is the honest part. Scootable is a best-effort guess, not an authority:

• The data can be stale or wrong. Speed limits change, signs get missed, and OpenStreetMap is edited by volunteers. A road’s color is only as good as the record behind it — and some speeds are inferred from the road type, not measured.
• A green road is not a promise. It means “this looks legal and rideable to me,” not “the state has cleared this.” The posted sign in front of you always wins.
• It doesn’t know about the real world today. Construction, closures, road surface, gravel, potholes, traffic, weather, whether there’s a usable shoulder — none of that is in here. Use your eyes.
• One-way streets aren’t modeled yet. The router currently treats roads as two-way, so a suggested turn might point the wrong way down a one-way. (A known limit, on the list.)
• The legal calls are a plain reading, not legal advice. I read the NJ and PA rules and did my best. If getting it exactly right matters to you, check the statute.

In short: let it point you at likely-good roads, then ride like the map might be wrong — because sometimes it is.

Credits

Road data © OpenStreetMap contributors, used under the Open Database License (ODbL). See the OpenStreetMap copyright for terms. Basemap tiles © CARTO. Address search by OpenStreetMap Nominatim. Speed references cross-checked against NJDOT and PennDOT public records. Built as a personal project — free, and not affiliated with any of the above.