James Espy riding past a mountain reservoir

About the founder

James Espy

My first rides were on the back of my dad's Gold Wing. I didn't see him much, so those multi-day rides around Central Texas had a big impact and planted the seeds of passion for riding and long-distance touring. I didn't learn to ride until high school, when I started to use my step-brother's Honda 125 street bike to zip in and out of traffic on my way to work after school. It was not well maintained. At one point, the throttle cable broke out of the housing leading into the grip. So we just wrapped around the outside of the grip, something that got repeated at every light until it frayed and was too short to make it around the handlebar. So I would ride with squeezed in my fist, hand resting on top of the handlebar, pulling backwards to accelerate.

James as a child riding on the back of his dad's Gold Wing
On the back of Dad’s Gold Wing.

My first bike that was mine was a Suzuki Madura 700 that I bought on layaway in college. It was a commuter bike, but Barry Wynns (MotoScore™ contributor) and I used to pull out a map of Texas, turn our heads and poke. Where ever that finger landed, that was our ride for the day. It was on that bike that we took our first big trip from Austin to Sewanee, TN, an experience that got us both hooked on touring.

After, came a 1986 Honda V65 Magna (the same model as my Dad's last bike), which I sold to move to Hawai'i after college.

James with Barry Wynns and Shane Williamson behind their motorcycles
Barry Wynns and Shane Williamson — MotoScore contributors and the people who made the long roads worth riding.

Then life happened. Career changes, marriage and fantastic daughter, running a martial arts school for 17 years…just kept not getting another motorcycle. Before I knew it 26 years had passed and the time had come to get a bike and make up for lost time. Every road I could find in the Texas Hill Country. Trips from Austin to Big Bend, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona and Utah. A 6,400 mile epic ride up past the TransAlaska Highway in Canada and back (8 states and 2 provinces). And now I'm in northern Colorado and I have world-class canyon twisties, high plains, and mountain passes in my backyard!

While I was rediscovering my love for riding, I changed careers from teaching martial arts to software engineering. Somewhere along the line it hit me that every mapping and route app I used was missing something. Some were too complicated or just didn't do enough. Some (Google maps, I'm looking at you) optimize for fastest, shortest, least traffic. Nobody was optimizing for fun. Nobody was asking whether a road had the curves, the elevation, the views, the surface quality that make you want to ride it twice. I found myself having to bounce back and forth between apps to get the routes I wanted.

So I built MotoScore. It's the tool my buddy and I needed thirty years ago when we were dropping fingers on a paper map — a way to know, before kickstands go up, whether a road is worth the trip. The algorithm scores roads on six factors (curvature, elevation change, surface quality, vertical exposure, altitude ceiling, and scenic impact), tuned for how you ride, whether that's sport, touring, or adventure. It's built by a rider, for riders. And it's still the same basic question I've been asking since I was a kid on the back of that Gold Wing: where's the good road?

MotoScore is built by riders, for riders!

Zugunruhe Labs

Why we built this

Zugunruhe Labs isn't a corporate product. It's a small team of engineers — riders first — building the tools we wished existed for our own rides.

About the name

Zugunruhe (TSOOG-oon-roo-eh) is the German word ornithologists use for the migratory restlessness in birds — the agitation that drives them onto the wing when the season turns. We picked it during the planning of a trip to Canada, when the four of us were itchier than we could explain about getting on the road. It captured something exact that English didn't have a word for.

We know it's not a great marketing name. Hard to pronounce, harder to remember, impossible to say at a party without explaining. We kept it anyway. It describes what actually drives us — onto the road, and into building products that support what happens out there. Picking a name that tested well in focus groups would have meant picking a name that didn't mean anything to us.

Who we are

James Espy is the founder. The team is a circle of motorcycle enthusiasts who happen to be engineers, exploring the connection between tech and riding. Every product we ship is one we use ourselves, every ride. We're not building for a market — we're building for the next route we plan to ride this weekend. If others find what we make useful, that's the best outcome we can hope for.

The goal isn't to grow fast or sell out. The goal is to make Zugunruhe Labs successful enough that we can keep doing this — that exploring the intersection of riding and software becomes the thing we get to do full-time, not the thing we do in the evenings between work and family.

That shapes everything else. Including these commitments:

  • No ads. We do not show advertising in any Zugunruhe product. No banner ads, no sponsored content, no promotional placements. Ever.
  • No data sales. We do not sell your personal data, location data, route data, or ratings to anyone. We do not share it with data brokers, marketers, or analytics resellers. Ever.
  • Your data is yours. Your routes, ratings, and preferences are yours. We use them to deliver the product you pay for and to improve our scoring model. That's it.

We sustain Zugunruhe Labs through subscriptions and one-time purchases. That's the entire revenue model. If enough people find these products worth paying for, we get to keep building them. That's the deal.