Heatwave wins Rep. Vicente Gonzalez’s 2025 Congressional App Challenge in Texas’s 34th District

When asked what inspired the creation of Heatwave, Max Moyle said, “I live in the Rio Grande Valley—the southern tip of Texas—where the air does that trick of turning blinding light into a physical thing you can feel on your reddening forearms. Summers stack up with roughly seventy-five days over a hundred degrees, sometimes worse; I remember a day a few summers ago stuck to the plasticky, broiling seat of a crowded and chattering school bus idling in one-hundred-and-seventeen-degree air without air conditioning. A few weeks ago (ten, to be precise), I was volunteering, pulling invasive weeds along a crumbly shoulder at five in the afternoon–ninety-five degrees, no shade, blistering light flickering when a car nosed past. I was outside for about an hour. When my mom picked me up, I sank into the seat and thumbed the vent button from two to five. Painfully cold air ticked across my face, turning sweat into salt.
We rolled over the highway, and there he was: an older man in a faded grey tee, walking the edge, his steps the kind that know what they’re doing because they’ve done it too many times. Then a woman with a cart, a pair of teens with bandanas tied low. They were on the same hot edge I’d just escaped, as if the shoulder were a thin conveyor for anyone without a cabin filter and a set of vents. 

“I thought of the cross-country kids we pass every weekday—their shorts as bright as traffic cones, elbows metronoming—pounding along the side of whan eight-lane road that offers no trees, no sidewalk lip to speak of, only the quick, boiling breath of passing trucks. Why these routes, when quieter, shadier streets sit one block over? The question idled, like a dashboard light you mean to look up later, until a midweek detour forced us onto an unfamiliar path and into Apple Maps. The walking line traced the same arteries as the driving one, as if feet and wheels shared a single bloodstream. That’s when it clicked: the map—and the city beneath it—optimizes for cars. Speed, legality, arterials, measurable efficiency. Pedestrians need different things: shade, safety, breath, a breeze that isn’t truck-made, the long comfort of a tree line. I checked Google Maps next, then Waze; same story. Even the ‘walking’ routes use car-centric logic. So I built Heatwave.”