Pedestrian and bike routing on areas

[bhousel]

from https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Top_Ten_Tasks#Pedestrian_and_bike_routing_on_areas

Pedestrian and bike routing on areas

• What's involved: algorithms, routing engines
• Who can you talk to: dev mailing list or EWG
• What's being done already: see list below

The goal of this task is to implement correct distance calculation and connectivity across plazas (including to inner rings of multipolygons), and visual display of the resulting route.

Plazas and squares are a prominent feature of pedestrian networks and have been mapped as highway=pedestrian/footway/... + area=yes for a long time. Still, none of the routing engines included on osm.org currently support this feature, which leads to mapping for the router and undersells the data quality of OSM.

This feature can be implemented using any pedestrian router that fulfils the inclusion criteria for osm.org.

Previous work:

• User:Maxbe/Routen über Flächen – comprehensive, illustrated user page on the topic (German)
• https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper/issues/82 - for many links to code and papers

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_This issue comes from the OSM Top Ten Tasks page_

[1ec5]

Relevant issues for OSM-powered routers:

• BRouter: abrensch/brouter#108
• GraphHopper: graphhopper/graphhopper#82
• Openrouteservice: no issue yet as far as I can tell
• Organic Maps: organicmaps/organicmaps#4147
• OsmAnd: osmandapp/Osmand#2586
• OSRM: Project-OSRM/osrm-backend#64
• Valhalla: valhalla/valhalla#42 valhalla/valhalla#3570

OpenTripPlanner appears to already support routing through areas by building a “visibility graph”, although there are some known issues. MOTIS Per Pedes Routing also supports routing through areas.

[1ec5]

@hungerburg pointed out Routago, which tries to route through pedestrian areas. (However, it also routes along the walls of adjacent buildings and ricochets around the pedestrian area, somewhat defeating the purpose.)

Edit: As pointed out below, this behavior is intended for blind pedestrians who do use walls for navigation.

[hungerburg]

If a router specifically targets the blind, it might be in the very interest of its users to go along the walls of adjacent buildings, rather than follow the shortest path.

(This is not meant as a comment on the quality of the routago implementation, but rather on what people want from plaza routing.)

[1ec5]

A look at the performance implications of computing a visibility graph over pedestrian areas, from the Openrouteservice team, which had a test deployment of that feature at one point.

[biodranik]

Organic Maps tracks this issue here: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/5478