[Talk-us] Bike / Pedestrian directions on the MQ Open sites

[Toby Murray]

*Like*

The bicycle router picks almost the exact route I take to work when I
tell it to avoid hills.

One thing I've noticed is that starting and ending positions are kind
of weird when they involve a building polygon. I'm guessing buildings
are reduced to a centroid point in the routing engine and it just
selects the nearest way as the start/end point of the route. This
leads to a slightly odd route sometimes. For example, zoom in on the
north end of this route:

http://open.mapquest.com/?le=t&hk=4-FQcACEdy&vs=

Obviously the better starting location would be where the footway
intersects the building outline on the south corner. That intersection
node is even marked with building=entrance. Perhaps explicitly mapped
entrances could be taken into account by the routing engine?

Another route where this would help:

http://open.mapquest.com/link/9-Xhit54ly

The route takes you right past a door on the south end of Anderson
Hall in favor of the walkway end point that is closest to the building
centroid.

Toby