[Strategic] Routing

[Richard Weait]

The discussion thread on talk-ca that Frederik referred to is here.

http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-ca/2011-March/003775.html

as of a few minutes ago the thread consists of 30+ messages. Typical
messages are positive reviews of the router, reports of a routing bug
that has been found and fixed, and complementary messages from mappers
to other mappers.

I find this routing implementation a very helpful tool.  In a few
hours, with a few mappers, we've greatly improved cross-country
routing in Canada.  Thank you, Frederik and Geofabrik for hosting the
demo, and for including Canada in the experiment.

This is spectacular.  We must make this, or something like it,
available for mappers.  It's a quick, fun way to check and improve my
contributions to OSM.  This could be almost as helpful as the first
availability of rendering.  That probably suggests that there will be
vigorous discussions about the drawbacks of tagging for the router,
but that's probably months down the road.