Is the goal to...

maximize pedaling to not-pedaling ratio? (workout purposes)

or

minimize commute time? (waste less time)

or

minimize total stoppage time? (stay warm in cold climate??)

Google maps has a bike route feature. It does option 2 well.

EDIT: Or is the goal some optimization of a combination 1 & 2?

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Exactly, goal is a combination of 2) minimizing total commute time and 1) maximizing the ratio of time pedaling. I agree, google maps does pretty well finding a relatively fast route, but it tends to prefer routing onto bike paths, lanes, trails which are commonly used and less fast (for me) than relatively quiet light/stop-free roads would be. If I'm thinking about tweaking a route, it would be nice to know that X route has 30 lights, whereas X' has 27 traffic lights but is 0.3 miles longer (probably a win for me both for 1) and 2).

I know what you mean re: Google. Google assumes bikers are slower than the average triathlete, resulting in shorter routes with more stops & turns than would be optimal for even option 2.

I'd be interested in your app idea too.

Wonder if Wahoo's "take me to..." option's route planner is any better at assuming higher user average speeds? Maybe there are others. Komoot certainly has the brand name that would lead me to believe they might do it better. ha

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Dr. Alex Harrison | Founder & CEO | Sport Physiology & Performance PhD
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If rolling with traffic, why not just use Waze and leave it in car mode as opposed to bike.

Strava heat map might might be helpful. I assume the users are responding to similar motivations as you. Don't think it would provide any hard info on stop lights, etc, like you mention in later posts. Likewise, it would not be customized for your commute. But I think the thoroughfares used by hardcore commuters would light up.

x2 on Strava Heat Maps. Those riders are often, though not always, seeking similar things that you seek from your ride.

When I lived in Philly, I noticed that the lights were timed in such a way that if you travelled at a speed divisible by 9mph [18mph, 27mph, and so on] you'd make all the lights, except Broad Street

Maybe I was just lucky?

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In addition to the Strava heat maps premium feature, pull up some segments along the possible routes. Then pull up the rider's rides on those areas. Take a look at their differential between total time and moving times and also the time of day. This can give you an idea of how to optimize.

I do this for training rides as it drives me insane to constantly stop and wait. Or wasting time leaving town to ride in the more rural areas.

You're going to be riding potentially 10 times a week. Start off riding and over first month with a couple of detours you'll work it out.

But don't worry too much about the lights for now, trust me once you start commuting you'll use them as sprints and targets for effort from the upstream set of lights (spoiler, this is my day job, and whilst they do seem random, you'll find that in almost any area that they actually are sequenced and whilst reacting to traffic, in most cases at the time you commute they tend to be pretty consistent).

Commuter riding is different to normal training, but trust me, it's incredibly effective as training even if you don't realise it. Mainly that everyday fatigue that builds up, and Thursdays your legs do feel heavy (Friday you know it's the end of the week so it somehow feels easier). But I was commuter cycling years before I got into tri and road riding. And it was only my first few races I really realised just how good it was. Oh and a trip to the velodrome to watch the racing and a competition on a watt bike where I averaged 1150watts for a 200m sprint in jeans and trainers.

First Ironman I came off the bike 90mins ahead of my coaches plan for the race as we'd not realised how strong a rider I was, purely from years of commuter cycling,

Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I had used Strava heatmaps to try to pick out good routes and it works decently, but does suffer somewhat from the same issues as Google maps in that it overweights the bike paths relative to fast quiet roads. The bike paths are nice, but can be hard to ride at 30kph+ when the weather is nice and peds are out. I like burnthesheep's suggestion of looking up riders on Strava but haven't found anyone yet with quite the same commute, and most segment leaderboards are dominated by roadies leaving the city or coming back into the city rather than by commuters.

Duncan74: I don't actually find commuting all that different from normal training riding, maybe in part because I used to live in a part of the city where my training rides would all involve a component of stops and lights to get out to quieter roads. I'm also not doing this everyday -- still partly WFH... just trying to make the commutes count fitness-wise.

One thing I did find helpful was trying to pick a set of intermediate junction points and to map out and just manually (by google maps) count the number of lights on different sub-routes between the junction points. Still too much noise in real-world conditions (wind, light timing, etc) to tell which route variants really work best, but got a new best time of 54:27 moving/57:45 elapsed this AM on a 17 mile route (wind assist...). Big gains in stoppage time and average speed from the initial 57:01 moving/65:27 elapsed on the 15.7 mile route I took the first day.