Changelog

Search any household item — a yoghurt pot, a broken plastic bowl, a duvet — and see which Kiertokaari bin it goes in. Every item carries the Finnish word for it, so you can type the word printed on the bin and get the answer back in both languages. It is built for a city whose bins are labelled in Finnish and whose newcomers often are not yet.

Put a rent you have been quoted against what people in Oulu actually pay for that size of flat. The figures come from Statistics Finland's quarterly rent tables and are read fresh each time the page loads. It is a comparison, not a verdict — and it says plainly what the statistic includes, that student and city housing sit below the range for good reason, and that the real test of a fake listing is how the other person behaves, not the price.

Oulu has road-weather stations standing on the Baana cycleways themselves — Kembaana, Maikkulan baana and Linnanmaan baana — measuring the snow lying on the path, how cold the surface is and the dew point every fifteen minutes, each with a camera pointed along the path. Nobody was reading them. This page does, with the city's own clearing clocks beside them and the count of maintenance passes logged in the last 24 hours. When the surface is at or below freezing and the dew point is above it, the page says so: that is the condition that turns a dry-looking path into ice. Three instruments cannot speak for 900 km of path, and the page says that too — the neighbour-reported board is still where you tell each other what a route is actually like.

The verified headline dates through the rest of 2026: the Summer Night's Dinner on 15 August, the Delta Life finale and Air Guitar World Championships in late August, and two new museums opening this autumn. Pinned to the town page.

Two new tools for Oulu. **When's the next bus?** reads Oulu Regional Transport's own real-time feed and shows the next departures from four stops: Rotuaari in the middle of town, Pekuri for the buses out to Kiiminki, Haukipudas and Muhos, the university at Linnanmaa, and the hospital. Each time is marked either live — an estimate coming off the bus itself — or timetable, which is the plan and can change. OSL's current service notices sit above the boards, labelled as network-wide, because they are: the feed publishes them for the whole network rather than for one stop. The page also carries what the board cannot show you — the ticket. One flat fare covers the whole OSL area however far you go, valid 90 minutes, so changing bus inside that window costs nothing extra. An adult single is 2,90 € from the app, an OSL card, an R-kioski or a contactless tap; from the driver it is cash only, 5,00 €, and double that between 23:00 and 04:30. **Weather warnings for Oulu** shows every warning the Finnish Meteorological Institute currently has in force for Pohjois-Pohjanmaa, in FMI's own words and their own English. A warning covers the whole county — from the coast here inland past Pudasjärvi and Kuusamo — so the page says that plainly rather than letting a county-wide thunderstorm warning read as a forecast for your street. It is not an alert service and nothing on it will reach your phone; the 112 Suomi app and Yle's emergency bulletins are linked for that.

The town page now opens with a colored-pencil banner of the red storehouses and the old market hall along the Oulujoki delta quay, a wooden tar-boat drawn up at the water's edge.

Oulu's first tools are live, in English for its students and newcomers. One works out today's daylight — from the near-endless light of midsummer to the short days of winter. Another says whether it's worth heading out for the northern lights tonight. A step-by-step guide walks newcomers through finding a place to live and steering clear of rental scams. And a neighbour-reported board shows which cycle and walking paths have been cleared.