[OSM-talk] Cycle route planning using OSM

Tom Chance tom at acrewoods.net
Tue Apr 3 11:44:37 BST 2007


Ahoy,

On Tue, 03 Apr 2007 12:16:51 +0200, Styno <styno at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Cycling specific topics popup on this ML now and then. The discussions
> die slowly [1] often without having made new agreements, perhaps a ML
> isn't the proper place. But also the proposed features pages in the wiki
> [2] are not very productive on subjects that do not attract a large
> audience. I agree that OSM needs some additional mapping rules aimed at
> cyclists, hikers etc. in order to make efficient routing possible.

I suppose it really needs one or two people to go away and produce a detailed proposal that everyone can then comment on, tweak, etc. on the wiki. It's quite difficult to address something so comprehensive as that bit by bit. It's much more than a few tags.

It would also be worth thinking about pedestrians, since similar issues arise (e.g. "is there a pavement/cycle line on this/both sides?", "how busy is the road?", "what amenities and physical features make this way pleasant to walk/cycle down?", "are there any obstructions that slow you down?", "how hilly is the route?", and so on).

> Currently I'm investigating how to implement a platform that can be used
> to provide (turn-by-turn) route planning for both online and offline use
> specifically aimed at cycling (for now). Mostly because mostly (all)
> route planners target cars and cycling specific sites only offer static
> data. So far I'm thinking of using RoadNav [3] as the back-end because
> it is (the only?) OpenSource (GPL) project that supports turn-by-tun
> routing and has basic support for OSM. As the user interface I'm
> thinking of using Opera for handheld devices because it has good SVG
> support. Another project that could profit from the tiles at home work
> might be GpsDrive [4], but this project doesn't support turn-by-turn
> routing and development seems to have stopped.

So this is just the software, not the data, that you're working on?

There should probably be a separate project for cyclists and pedestrians, a kind of "OSM for humans" :-) Freemap is making good progress in producing a slippy map for countryside walks. It will really need a different approach to rendering, showing different data, and different tools to make it easy for people to enter the data specific to this project. Use the same database, of course, or at least use the OSM database and only store additional data separately.

Kind regards,
tom





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