Every driver picks their own speed. Nobody agrees. The result is a highway full of braking, accelerating, tailgating — and accidents waiting to happen. Syncway fixes the coordination problem that traffic engineers have been trying to solve for decades.
You set your adaptive cruise to 110. The car ahead is doing 95. You slow down, overtake, find space — only for someone behind you to sit two metres from your bumper doing 125.
Nobody is deliberately being difficult. Everyone is just picking their own speed with no shared reference point. The result is a highway full of tiny speed differentials that ripple backwards into phantom traffic jams, unnecessary braking, wasted fuel, and real accidents.
The fix seemed obvious: what if everyone knew what speed the car ahead was doing — before they got close enough to tailgate?
No hardware. No subscriptions. No waiting for car manufacturers to agree on a standard. Just open the app.
Open Syncway and your GPS speed is broadcast anonymously to drivers within 1km. Your car color and type — nothing else. No account, no license plate, no personal data.
See nearby broadcasters on a live map. Pick someone driving at a speed that suits you. Tap to follow — their speed shows prominently on your screen.
Lock your adaptive cruise control to their speed. The delta indicator tells you if you're perfectly synced, slightly faster, or slightly slower. Adjust and settle in. You're now in a train.
Traffic engineers have known for decades that synchronized driving dramatically reduces congestion, fuel consumption, and accident risk. The problem is implementation — connected vehicle standards are still 10-20 years from mass adoption. Syncway does it now, with any phone, any car, any road. No infrastructure required. Just people choosing to coordinate.
Constant acceleration and braking is one of the biggest sources of unnecessary fuel consumption on highways. Smooth, synchronized driving at a consistent speed can meaningfully reduce it — across millions of trips.
Every train that forms is a data point. Where do spontaneous speed agreements happen? Where do they break down? That data is genuinely valuable — for cities, researchers, fleet operators, and insurers.
Trucks can't mount a rear display — but they can broadcast. A truck doing a steady 90 km/h on the A2 becomes a natural train anchor. Cars slot in behind and the whole convoy moves as one.
The protocol is open. Any app, any car manufacturer, any navigation system can implement it. Syncway is the reference implementation — not a gatekeeper.
Syncway is MIT licensed. The server, the app, the protocol — all of it is open for inspection, contribution, and forking.
Node.js WebSocket server. Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS frontend. Leaflet maps. Docker. That's it. No framework churn, no vendor lock-in, no magic. The entire stack fits in your head after an afternoon of reading. Contributions welcome — especially native Android GPS integration, iOS support, and map improvements.