Hacker News Reader

Comment by jobu | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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?

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.

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.)

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com