[Routing] Crowdsourced costing - offer of writing a client+metric for it

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Jaak Laineste wrote:
> I would suggest to have live traffic event data, collectable mostly using
> mobile devices from the road. The events could be:

To all those wo suggest some sort auf automatic data collection for 
routing, my answer is: Yes, this may be a good idea, but others will 
beat us to it. Tomtom, Garmin, Google - whoever does routing will have 
an interest in that, and will, as soon as feasible, make devices that 
actually report the traffic situation in real-time.

We might be able to match that with a lot of effort and hacking their 
devices to report data to us as well, but we'll never be the frontrunner 
on this topic.

But the one thing we have and they don't is, we have an expert among us 
for almost every single road! We have someone who lives round the corner 
and who can tell us first-hand whether the road is likely to be blocked 
or difficult at certain times, which path he would use, and so on. This 
is the key thing that sets us apart from the big players, and we must 
make use of this capacity. Automatic derivation of traffic situation 
data is not an OSM USP, everyone can (and will) do it.

Bye
Frederik