Forget the Shortest Route Across a City – New Algorithm Finds the Most Beautiful | Hacker News Reader

Forget the Shortest Route Across a City – New Algorithm Finds the Most Beautiful

technologyreview.com

78 pointsot24 comments

Can someone please make a "low-stress routing algorithm"!? Most days I honestly wouldn't care if a route took me 50-100% longer to travel if avoided traffic backups and stop lights. Call it "sane route" or "road rage free routing", but as long as I'm moving in traffic I have a much lower level of stress when I arrive at my destination.

This is why I prefer to bike everywhere from home to work.

*Edit - Rain stresses my bike ride

(I find biking stress free, compared to driving in SF... don't know why that was downvoted.)

IMO "keeping up the speed" isn't quite the same as low-stress.

For example, I'd rather go a little slower overall if it meant avoiding unprotected lefts that feel risky or stressful.

Exactly what I was thinking. Hipmunk does something like this for minimizing the pain of flying, which I always thought was a great idea.

There is no "feature" more infuriating or inappropriately named than "traffic calming" by means of timing the lights so that you have to stop every single block. It almost makes me want to drive as dangerously as possible just to spite the policy people who thought that was a good idea.

This exists - for bikes. For a few years now, Cyclestreets have been offering 'fast' vs 'quiet' routing (quiet being the stress-free option on a bike)

http://www.cyclestreets.net/journey/

It tries, but often it will warn you that some parts of the route have to take in busy roads.

They do it as an API (http://www.cyclestreets.net/api/), it's used in a number of apps and sites, and most of it is open source (https://github.com/cyclestreets). I'm sure you could similarly construct stress-free driving routes, you just need a metric and the data?

There is already an issue for this. Would love to get a PR ;) https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper/issues/75

So is this the politically correct version of the "avoid ghetto" function that people joke about?

In all seriousness though, it is pretty cool use of data mining and crowdsourcing.

I could have used a feature like that when my GPS told me to cut through the Chicago suburbs to avoid highway traffic on my trip across the U.S. last summer.

I was nearly scared to death.

My first trip to California I flew into John Wayne and stayed in LA for a couple of months. On the way back to John Wayne in OC I attempted to avoid traffic. The app took me straight through a pretty bad part of Compton. That was a fun experience.

Compton's the new Brooklyn, haven't you heard

Wouldn't that be pretty easy to do with a crime map for an area?

Just add an option to avoid high crime areas.

That's what the "avoid ghetto" function is, which really exists (and has for some time).

....where is this option? That kind of thing is invaluable in cities like Baltimore, Detroit, Miami, Philly, etc

I say we start taking lots of pictures in the ghetto, just to screw with them. Who's with me?

This is pretty neat; I'd definitely use an app that did this. Not really a "new algorithm" as they say, though; when you boil it down it's really just A* and MTurk. However, it's a really cool application, and what use is science without its applications?

"Why the fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached."

Yeah, I had a similar reaction. The only novel thing I can think of here is the idea of using publicly-available photos on Flickr etc. to try to automatically rank the beauty of parts of the city, to avoid having to crowd source the data.

Otherwise, yeah, it's just assigning weights to different street/path segments based on perceived beauty rather than some other metric (like amount of traffic).

It always takes you through the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone no matter where you start and end.

"What? You said MOST beautiful, not shortest!"

Reminds me of a cross-country (US) trip I made some years back. Having just passed through Mt. Rushmore (home of the National Memorial Parking Scam), I asked for suggestions on routes further east. I was immediately guided to the most direct route.

I interrupted, pointing out that I'd started in southern California, was headed to Virginia, and was more interested in the scenic route. I then got pointed on some amazingly beautiful roads through the Black Hills and skirting the Pine Ridge reservation, with an Indian pow-wow on the radio, and, after sunset, a lightning storm playing out on the horizon in my rear view mirror. Spectacular.

I've been known to take the scenic route through town (or between towns) as well, particularly to avoid both traffic and ugliness.

Seeing that route map gave me a pang of nostalgia, since it was the route I walked every day for a year when I was studying at the LSE—back and forth from the Southwark dorm (across the street from the Tate Modern) across the Millennium Bridge or Blackfriar's Bridge, either down Fleet Street or Inner/Middle Temple, and then to the Aldwych. Really beautiful views of the Thames every day—Houses of Parliament and the Eye of London in one direction, Tower Bridge in the other direction.

Very cool idea!

Couldn't you do the same thing without crowdsourcing the opinions of what the most beautiful route by simply using exif data on troves of say, flickr images? I assume that you could tell which routes are more beautiful or interesting by the sheer number of images that are taken at specific locations.

I imagine they introduced sentiment analysis/crowdsourced beauty opinions to filter out 'negative' photos, e.g. some highly-photographed traffic accident, or a frequently photographed homeless spot

Very cool. Unless I am in a terrible rush from Ottawa's west end to points downtown or east, I will often take the river route. It's a bit longer, but ever so much nicer.

And if I am anywhere near Colonel By and it makes sense, I'll take it. Beautiful drives soothe the nerves.

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