About RideWindow

RideWindow answers one question Metro Vancouver cyclists ask constantly: is it actually going to rain on my ride? Pick one of the curated local routes and it checks current conditions and the short-term precipitation forecast at each checkpoint along the way, instead of a single city-wide forecast that might miss what’s happening up a specific valley or mountain road. Built for Metro Vancouver, but the custom route checker works anywhere — paste a RideWithGPS link for any route and it’ll pull live conditions for it.

How it works

Every route is broken into one or more checkpoints — for a short loop that might just be the start; for something like the Sea-to-Sky corridor, it’s several points spread along the way. Each checkpoint is checked independently, then rolled up into a single traffic-light indicator for the whole route (worst case wins — one wet checkpoint makes the route yellow or red, even if the rest looks clear). The traffic light itself only reflects the next few hours — if rain is expected later the same day, a checkpoint will say when instead of turning the badge red early.

Data sources

Conditions come from Environment Canada’s public citypage weather data at the nearest available station, falling back to OpenWeatherMap when no station is close enough to be useful (this comes up for mountain checkpoints like climb summits). Temperature and current condition are refined further using Environment Canada’s own high-resolution forecast model, queried at each checkpoint’s exact coordinates instead of the nearest named station, which can be tens of kilometres away. The hourly rain chart shows that same model’s output for the next day; the traffic light itself only looks at the next few hours of it, plus live radar — the most trustworthy near-term signal available, not a station’s own guess. Environment Canada’s multi-day text forecast is also shown for extra context, but never drives the traffic light. Every checkpoint card shows exactly which source is behind what you’re seeing. Where a Government of BC DriveBC highway camera is close enough to a checkpoint to be useful, its live image is shown too, with a link back to that camera’s DriveBC page. Each checkpoint also shows Environment Canada’s Air Quality Health Index and a wildfire-smoke (PM2.5) reading from its own forecast model — useful during wildfire season, but not the same thing as a fire-location or evacuation alert, which this app doesn’t provide. Like everything in this paragraph after current conditions and radar, air quality and the webcam are for context only and never affect the traffic light.

Custom routes

Don’t see your route in the list? Paste a public RideWithGPS link on the custom route page and it’ll pull the GPX track, sample a few checkpoints along it, and check those the same way.

No login, no tracking

Nothing to sign up for. Weather is fetched fresh on demand — hit refresh on a route page any time for the latest reading.