Before the Road, There Was the Idea
Post 1 of the CoolRide Series: An Introduction
There is something quietly terrifying about writing the first sentence of something that actually happened.
This is not a case study. It is not a pitch deck dressed up as a blog post. It is the honest, unfiltered story of CoolRide, a project I spent more than seven months building, breaking, rebuilding, nearly abandoning, and ultimately watching come alive on the roads of Singapore. A project I am proud of. And one that, I believe, has only just begun.
CoolRide was born under the Youth Development for Climate Tech (YDCT) program, an initiative by Sustainable Living Lab (SL2) in collaboration with Meta. But before I tell you what CoolRide is, and I will in the posts that follow, I want to tell you why this series exists at all.
Because most project write-ups lie. Not intentionally, but by omission.
They show you the final product glowing under pitch-room lights. They skip the weeks where nothing worked. They don't tell you about the team that nearly fell apart, the edge cases that punched back in production, or the moment a founder quietly decided to shut everything down and walk away. Those stories don't make it to LinkedIn. This one does.
A hackathon project lets you stand in front of a panel of judges, demonstrate a handful of features, and claim the rest as "coming soon." Sharp presentation skills, confident textbook knowledge, and a good slide deck can carry you through. I have done it. A lot of us have.
CoolRide was never that.
Every decision we made, every algorithm we chose, every route we designed, every assumption we baked into our system, was going to face real roads, real riders, real summer heat in Singapore. There was no panel to charm. There was only the product, and whatever it was worth when it met reality.
That difference changed how I think about building things forever.
My YDCT journey began the summer after my freshman year of college, a season I remember more for Zoom calls than sunshine. Our cohort gathered regularly for climate sessions that were unlike anything I had sat through before. We were not being lectured at. We were being oriented to a way of seeing.
We talked about heat, floods, air quality, and renewable energy, not as distant environmental concerns, but as layered, living problems that affect real communities in specific, often invisible ways. We discussed technology's role not as a universal fix but as one of many tools, to be picked up only when it was genuinely the right fit. That framing, market viability, practical relevance, and on-ground truth over technological novelty, became the lens through which I evaluated every idea I would have from that point on.
And I had many ideas. I brainstormed solutions for Delhi's air crisis, flooding patterns in Java, thermal stress in dense urban Singapore. I sketched city simulations, real-time shade mapping from tree canopy and building geometry, routing toward water bodies for cooler ambient air. The ideas were ambitious. Some were genuinely exciting.
But eventually, one stuck.
E-bike and cycle riders navigating Singapore's roads during extreme heat. A problem that belonged to a company called Anywheel, whose fleet was quietly facing a challenge that no one had built a proper solution for. What if an alternate routing algorithm, one that factored in thermal comfort and not just distance, could meaningfully change the experience, safety, and health outcomes of riders on the road?
That was the seed. Small, specific, solvable.
What I did not fully understand yet was how much distance exists between an idea that sounds right and an idea that works in the field. The foundational phase ended with an Ideathon.
I submitted. I won.
And that was only the beginning of realizing what I did not know.
The real education started when the idea had to become a product.
Sitting in one country and solving for another is humbling in ways that are difficult to describe until you experience it. Watching YouTube videos of Singapore's cycling infrastructure does not teach you how Singaporean riders actually behave at intersections. Academic papers on urban heat islands do not tell you what data actually exists, what is accessible, and what will cost you three weeks of back-and-forth to even confirm. The gap between a well-reasoned idea and a deployable system is bridged only by getting your hands dirty, and sometimes, by getting things spectacularly wrong first.
I will not spoil those stories here. They deserve their own space.
What I will say is this: there came a point in this project where inactivity in the team peaked, momentum stalled, and I made the quiet decision to finish the prototype myself, present it, and close the chapter. A controlled ending felt better than a messy one.
My team had other ideas about how this story would close. They showed up, and what followed was some of the most energising, grounding, and genuinely joyful collaboration I have experienced in any project, anywhere.
Comments
Post a Comment