[OSM-talk] OpenRouteService and footways/cycleways

[Peter Miller]

I have also been having a play with OpenRouteService.

I am very supportive of this project so please take the following points in
that spirit:

In general people will find things wrong with the underlying OSM data, they
will then fix the problems in the data and be keen to see the changes to
retest the routing and iterate again. This needs to be quick, a maximum of
one week, possibly aligned with the weekly planet, but ideally be on a daily
basis. From the news page of OpenRouteService is currently seems to be more
than a week but I might be wrong on that.

There is no documentation that I could find that describes the routing
algorithm and as such I don't know if it is taking elevation into account,
if it has a preference for cycle routes (defined by relations or lcn/rcn/ncn
etc), how it balances a direct primary route and longer minor road and if I
can adjust weighting for particular roads. Does it use the 'no left turn'
relationships? Incidentally in my town the routing engine is too keen to
route cyclists onto dangerous primary roads.

We need a wiki space (or trac space) where we can log and discuss these
requests and bugs. Where should we do this? Should there be a section on the
OpenRouteService wiki page for bugs and requests?

I caught it telling me to go the wrong way round a roundabout, but it
doesn't always seem to get it wrong (we drive on the left in the UK!). Does
it know that a junction=roundabout is special and assume that it is one-way
as per Map Features or must we add a 'oneway=yes' tag?

I suggest it makes a preference for routing people on signed cycle routes
and mentions this in the written instructions.

I don't think it ever tells one to get off and push a bike along a short
section of footway even when this is preferable.

It's gazetteer is a little weird and needs some work. It certainly seems to
have a problem with a "street,place" format. Again pointers to some
documentation would help.

It is still a bit car-centric. There is no way to do accessibility analysis
for cyclists or pedestrians; also there is no way to do 'fastest',
'shortest' and 'quietest' for cyclists and pedestrians.

The translation into English needs some work before it can be used for real.

Sorry for the long list, but as I said I think this is a very important
project and needs to develop and get these wrinkles out. There is an
expressed aspiration to open-source the code, if you get on with that aspect
then other people may do a lot of the above for you!


Regards,



Peter(Ito)


> -----Original Message-----
> From: talk-bounces at openstreetmap.org [mailto:talk-
> bounces at openstreetmap.org] On Behalf Of Tom Chance
> Sent: 03 September 2008 09:16
> To: talk at openstreetmap.org
> Subject: [Spam] [OSM-talk] OpenRouteService and footways/cycleways
> 
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I've been playing with http://openrouteservice.org and noticed that lots
> of
> routes are marked as footways even though they're on major cycle routes.
> For example, switch the the cycle map layer here and try to route along
> National Cycle Route 1. You can't do it!
> 
> http://data.giub.uni-
> bonn.de/openrouteservice/?zoom=14&lat=6724056.73561&lon=-
> 4373.6988&layers=00B0TTTTTT
> 
> So just a quick plea to mark up footpaths as bicycle=yes or even as
> highway=cycleway if that's appropriate.
> 
> Kind regards,
> Tom
> 
> 
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