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Comment by karussell | Hacker News Reader

Bike routes are currently heavily optimized already and sometimes I'm also a bit surprised about the good route quality ;) but actually this is only possible with the fantastic OpenStreetmap data. Still the most improvements are probably possible via data improvements in many areas. Still we will try to improve routes via "less turns" and more precise elevation data etc. For bike routing we only need to keep the balance between time, distance, simple route and beautiful route ;)

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I just tested some bike routes for my city. I agree, well done. ;)

Being able to export to gpx is also very cool.

I feel like "best" biking routes are very subjective, so I'm sure you can't cater everyone, perfectly.

A cool feature I'd love: the ability to Google Street view right from the non-Google Maps service. Would that be allowed?

Spreaking of bike routes, personally that's why I prefer Grasshopper over other route planners - exactly because it seems to show the most direct path, often avoiding large roads. Riding a bike along a road with heavy car traffic is not enjoyable.

Something you could do to be better than Google Maps would be to prefer stoplights over two way stops for left turns. That nearly got me sideswiped in SF once.

Do you have an example? (avoiding left turns is the same problem like avoiding turns in general that is possible now with some new code we have since 1.0 or so, but we have to do more work to make it working in real world)

I don't have a specific route I can link to, sorry. I was navigating in an unfamiliar area of SF once and directed to turn right one street before what turned out to be a major street, then make a left turn onto another major street. The directed left turn was from a stop sign onto a street with poor visibility and cross-traffic not stopping. If I had gone one street further before the right, there would have been a stoplight.

Basically if you have data on the type of an intersection, favoring nearby controlled intersections for difficult turns would probably be helfpul, especially in hilly areas.

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