OpenStreetMap Shortest Route Finder | Hacker News Reader

OpenStreetMap Shortest Route Finder

brouter.de

145 pointsaltilunium26 comments

There are many "shortest route finders", brouter isn't one of them. Shortest route finders are easy.

Brouter is far beyond that, it's all about finding a route that is better than the shortest one. With a wildly configurable preference metric, because cyclists have wildly different preferences.

(and it's designed to run offline, on an android phone with no connection, the linked page is just a web front-end)

One of the limitations I run into with OSM-based route finders is the lack of data for truck limitations - at least in my country. The data model supports it, the routing engines support it, the government has publicly available information about it, but somehow connecting both datasets has been eluding contributors for more than a decade now.

> the government has publicly available information about it

On what license? In which format? What is the quality of this data?

OSM community is not very import happy, for some quite good reasons.

And "publicly available" does not mean "on a compatible license". OSM was started because Ordnance Survey refused to make its data available under sane license.

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In meantime StreetComplete android app allows to relatively easily collect some of that - height limits under bridges, weight limits on bridges (disclaimer: I contributed to this app)

hey man, I love StreetComplete!

If I could suggest one feature: if the app see I am in a new location and I do not move much (read it: I am not driving my car), it could show me android notification asking if I want to answer for some questions about this place.

I love StreetComplete but as this is not an app you open everyday it is easy to forget about it for a few days and recall it only when you are back at home - where you already answered all the questions about every item around you. And you feel sorry you did some bicycle trip yesterday but forgot about contributing to OSM.

> in a new location and I do not move much

I though about it some time ago - and main problem here is that StreetComplete would need to sit in background and keep downloading/processing data what is quite battery and CPU heavy.

Right now I see no good way to implement this. But maybe it should just query data in a very narrow area, like 20m?

Also, from looking at https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/48 one of arguments against it is that you will get some quests ANYWHERE.

Have you disabled many quests? Or maybe you are in rural area with lower number of objects? In cities you tend to have endless supply of objects to tag and quests to answer.

If you omit the "www" HTTPS is working as well: https://brouter.de/brouter-web/

I work a lot with OSM, and this is the first router I've ever discovered that supports a "river" routing mode. I've been looking for something like this!

Does anyone know how BRouter compares to the other FOSS tools, like Valhalla or Graphhopper?

That and the height graph makes it really easy to find places in rivers that are going to be a bit rough. It was very easy to use this tool to get a GPX of a river.

Brouter is definitely one of the most useful resources if you're planning a ride: accurate routing, clear interface, import/export as GPX, etc.

I used brouter to make a map of the vintage MTB fest:

Http://www.vintagemtb.org/maps

It's good but as far as the interface goes there are some oddities due to linguistic weirdness (in my opinion, English not being my first language). For example there are a bunch of vehicle types for which I have to open the profile customization to figure out what it means. 'fastbike' also doen't seem a very common name (to test: enter that in a search engine and compare results with 'speedpedelec'). Another example: in the profile thare's 'cost' for downhill and uphill, but for fastbike the one for downhill defaults to 60 and the one for downhill 0. So is 'cost' wrong (sounds like penalty) or should the numbers be the other way around?

Try the glossary for more information. For example here is some help on the downhillcost:

https://github.com/poutnikl/Brouter-profiles/wiki/Glossary#d

There are several routing engines for open street map. One of them, graphhopper is pretty decent and open source even: https://github.com/graphhopper/

Thanks for mentioning GraphHopper. Happy to answer GraphHopper and OSM related questions :)

The "trekking bike" and "safety" profiles seem to work pretty well. The safety profile produces routes I would take any time of day and the trekking bike profile produces routes I would take outside of peak road rage hours.

I was planning to compile Brouter (or just the algorithm) part in WASM last year, never got it finished.

I would prefer the routing algorithm as WASM module so that routing apps can be done as static web sites. It's not that expensive algorithm after all.

Only hard part was splitting the dataset as static files, but it was neatly tiled already so it shouldn't be too hard.

I have been armchair-programming that myself recently, "could we perhaps wasm brouter into an offline-able PWA?", but getting the graph data to the browser would be quite an obstacle. They doing come in packages of about a hundred megabytes (depending on region, and you might want four of them)

Do you have some code already working for the WASM part?

BRouter works by relying on segments (relevant extracts from the OSM data, in a custom format) of 5x5 latitude/longitude degrees. See https://github.com/abrensch/brouter/blob/f3895791766dfcd7cd0... for their creation (full doc https://github.com/abrensch/brouter/blob/1765ec45230e337319c...).

From my knowledge of the BRouter codebase and past contributions, it should not be a big deal to move from 5x5 to something more web tractable (as 1x1 latitude/longitude).

Armchair only, sorry. Closest thing I've come to regarding brouter sources was wondering about what it would take to add relation names (road names). Because that could not only help route consumption (better turn instructions), it would also enable adding "road change" penalty to the rules: currently that's only based on direction change, which causes trouble in mountain environments where steep straight connections exist: the turn penalty affects the gentle switchback climb/descent harder than the undesirable straight.

Maybe I'm not getting something, but how do I make this thing tell me what the shortest route from A to B is?

Click different points, then click on the first point (the one with a play marker) and keep clicking it until you complete the track

Here is the video tutorial : https://twitter.com/rtnF14/status/1565939896183050250

Ok, it seems I'm just triggering a performance issue, which eventually causes a timeout: "operation killed by thread-priority-watchdog after 19 seconds". (I'm only seeing the straight lines I made.)

It’s a bit confusing; it asks you to “draw” a route but it won’t let you actually draw a line, at least on mobile; what you have to do instead is tap two points on the map and it figures out the route for you. This can take a few seconds though and there isn’t any UI indicator that it’s thinking, so you just have to be patient.

This is what I'm looking for. It can search the cycling route. I've randomly checked some suggested routes in Estonia with Google Map street view. The route looks good by avoiding the main street/highway and following the bike path. Thanks for making it.

Safety was a really cool edge weight to add as a preference for optimizing. I wonder what data source / heuristic they used for safety.

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