[Routing] "SatNav warriors invade Somerset village"

[Chris Fleming]

Marcus Wolschon wrote:
> SteveC schrieb:
> | On 2 Mar 2008, at 21:57, Marcus Wolschon wrote:
> |
> |
> | Sounds like an area where we all could improve on the commercial ones.
> |
> |> In what way would you improve it though? It's clearly *good* for
> |> drivers right now and *bad* for villagers.
>
> Sorry, I do not know the local situation and
> in the article is reads like ther is a high probability of
> traffic-jam in the village that the navigator does not
> know about because it is not in the automatic traffic-reporting
> (that covers only motorways).
>   
Fair enough. 

Whenever I've flow in or out of Bristol Airport, we've gone this way 
because it's much quicker than the official "route".

In this case the navigator is making the right decision, but the locals 
don't like it :)

What needs to be fixed is the road network around Bristol Airport....

A more interesting case, for where we can improve on existing 
navigation... is a few weekends ago I did the following route from 
Edinburgh to Newton Stewart,

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=d&hl=en&geocode=&saddr=Edinburgh&daddr=Newton+Stewart&sll=54.162434,-3.647461&sspn=17.680923,36.079102&ie=UTF8&ll=55.218057,-3.825989&spn=1.073254,2.254944&z=9

(The route was basically follow the A702 and then the A712, picked 
because it was the most direct route and also because the A712 was unmapped)

However having traveled down the A712, I can now see why it was 
unmapped, the road was narrow windy and very slow. In fact a friend 
traveling the same route  took the A74(M), A701 and the A75 in a quicker 
time.

Now we need some way of tagging "slow" roads, so that we don't pick 
then. I'm not sure if this would be an "average speed" tag or a you'll 
only go 3/4 or half the speed on this road compared to your speed on a 
"normal" A road?

It might also be interesting to build a set of interesting "test case" 
routes such as this that we can compare "hand" picked routes against the 
routing algorithm in order to find the best

Cheers
Chris


(While we were away; we noted that all the "in car" satnav's people had 
with then, picked the same route that I went, and that only the AA's 
website avoids the A712.)