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New and improved bike routing, with low stress options
- arikr 9y agoWonderful. I'd really like these same features in Waze and Google Maps - if it means I can avoid having to cross a busy intersection that's not a 4-way stop, and reduce stress and increase safety, I'd gladly accept a route that's a few minutes slower. Anyone from Waze or Google Maps team here?
- jschwartzi 9y agoYeah, this is a serious problem with Google Maps directions. They want to send cyclists down the fastest routes, which are usually the least safe routes. There's a route in Kent, WA that Google was recommending that was downhill on a 45 MPH two-lane street with no shoulder or dividers. Meanwhile, about a mile further south there was this safe, car-free route that wound through residential subdivisions.
- rwmj 9y agoNot just for cyclists. Around here Google Maps will find "shortcuts" through single track back country roads which are especially dangerous in winter by car or bike.
- maxerickson 9y agoThey will respond to feedback about such roads not being suitable for general traffic. If you are in the US the data problem is likely an artifact of TIGER which has hundreds or thousands of miles of roads that are given a single generic class which ends up being pretty unreliable outside of developed areas.
- seanp2k2 9y agoEven in the Bay Area, it's not hard to get GMaps to try to e.g. route you through a park, a fire road, a private road (the type with HOAs and nasty signs about how they'll prosecute you if you try to drive down their precious street).
- Kihashi 9y agoNot that it helps in the moment, but every time that has happened to me, I've reported it to Google and they've changed it.
- brookside 9y agoAs a cyclist another large issue I have with google maps is a suggested route's overlay having no transparency, so it's not possible to tell which parts of the route are indeed safer bike lanes and not just riding in traffic. I find myself constantly getting directions, then cancelling the navigation so I can once again see indicated bike lanes and adjust accordingly. A slight opacity on the route indicator would be a godsend.
- icebraining 9y agoIt's not GMaps, but I've been using Bike Citizens and it has an option to select one of three profiles, depending on how much you want to avoid busy/larger streets (Note: as far as I know they don't use Mapzen's algorithm.)
- arikr 9y ago(Oh, and I mean for journeys by car, not even by bike)
- rconti 9y agoOnly a tangent, but I just started a new job and used Google Maps to find me a route and it's absolutely glorious. It's on roads I never would have thought of, avoids streets with heavy traffic, only has 3 traffic lights.. I'm not sure if it's just dumb luck, or the fact that there are a decent number of neighborhoods through Palo Alto that are relaxed tree-lined streets, or what.. but it's only a couple miles shorter than my commute to my old job and an order of magnitude more pleasant. Looking forward to using this API to see if it recommends changes.
- novia 9y agoIf use_roads is set to zero, will this optimize for roads that include sidewalks?
- maxerickson 9y agoLikely not as many (most?) sidewalks aren't officially open to bikes (Regardless of enforcement on the one hand and regardless of some people preferring to use them on the other).
- baldfat 9y agoI remember as a 12 year old a cop swore at me and told me he was going to take my bike if he saw me ride on the sidewalk again. So then 2 blocks later ANOTHER cop is swearing at me calling me crazy and going to drive me home for riding on the road when there was a sidewalk to ride on. I laughed and said the other one told me to get off the sidewalk. He called him and they got in an argument and hung up on him. I just rode my bike on the sidewalk.
- cjf101 9y agoHeh, that's awesome. I think it illustrates how confused people are in general about where bikes are supposed to be, which I think is a complicated cross of law, culture, cycling ability, and infrastructure. The police have never hassled me for being on any road on a bike. But man, do the dudes in pickup trucks with truck nuts love to tell me to get off the road.
- blt 9y agoYeah, it even happened to me in progressive utopia Olympia, WA.
- cafard 9y agoWithin the downtown area of Washington, DC, bikes are not allowed on the sidewalk. (This is roughly the area bounded by Massachusetts or Florida Ave. on the north, Georgetown on the west and the Capitol on the east.) Couriers, tourists, and a lot of others disregard the regulation.
- sathomasga 9y agoIs there any way to see a demo of this algorithm for a route of the user's choosing? I'm not familiar enough with San Francisco to evaluate the improvement mentioned in the blog. If I could try some routes in Atlanta, however, I'd get a better sense.
- maxerickson 9y agoThe routing engine in general is available as an option at openstreetmap.org: http://www.openstreetmap.org/directions?engine=mapzen_bicycle&route=33.7803%2C-84.4934%3B33.7201%2C-84.4540#map=13/33.7498/-84.4749 http://www.openstreetmap.org/directions?engine=mapzen_bicycl... I checked the request, the JS powering the OSM feature isn't sending the parameters so they are probably the 0.25 defaults there.
- burritojustice 9y agoHi! I'm with Mapzen. Yes, the default for `bicycle` are now 0.25. If you're familiar with Leaflet, it's also pretty easy to draw routes in mapzen.js and pass different parameters to the router -- check the bottom of that post.
- maxerickson 9y agoI would probably try to make a bookmarklet that registered a couple more engines: https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/blob/3d6a3a6de33aa0c1bc436bce9ea9da33e00460ff/app/assets/javascripts/index/directions/mapzen.js https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/blob/...
- rconti 9y agoWow, first thing I noticed using MapZen is it sends me over a heavily trafficked freeway overpass to my office... when a detour of only a few hundred feet has me going over a very pleasant bike bridge DIRECTLY into my office parking lot. Will have to check out of the rest of the route vs what Google Maps has me doing now, though. I'm pretty happy with the current route but I'm new to this job so I've got a lot of route exploring to do.
- boxcardavin 9y agoRiding an ebike has dramatically changed the routes I take when commuting because I now prioritize safety and enjoyment over pure efficiency or avoiding inclines. My commute is 25 minutes on an ebike vs 70 on a regular bike, or 30 in a car in traffic.
- agumonkey 9y agoBarely related but EV drivers also change their path. I don't have an EV (car or bike) don't really like driving in traffic (too chaotic for my brain) I often take smaller, slower roads where I just coast along smoothly. That said I wish I could try an ebike or even an EV.
- komali2 9y agoReminds me of how I had to take feeder roads and turn off the freeway during bad traffic when my shitty old toyota would overheat if I couldn't get good airflow into the radiator :P
- agumonkey 9y ago"mechanical sympathy"
- protomyth 9y agoIt is amazing how folks have to plan when their vehicle is ‘non-optimal’. For the almost opposite effect, I had a Ford Ranger (passed unwillingly to me) that even with 700lbs of weight on the back axle and good winter (non-stud) tires sucked in winter. I was very careful about my route anywhere.
- agumonkey 9y agoAllow me to extrapolate wildly: progress considered harmful ?
- drumttocs8 9y ago"When he is not writing sick c++ programs he is most likely writing sick music." This kid is pretty cool.
- lasryaric 9y agoIs there a bike routing product that uses this new api that I can use? I spend hours finding the "less stressfull" bike routes. I like hills but I really value safety.
- loeg 9y agoOpenStreetMap in Mapzen (bicycle) mode. Unfortunately the routes aren't great, at least for my area of Seattle.
- slashdotdash 9y agoStrava[1] provides a cycle route builder that uses the popularity of routes based on their dataset of uploaded rides. As it's using recorded rides, typically by local riders, I've found it produces good routing; quiet roads similar to those you'd choose if you knew the area well. [1] https://www.strava.com https://www.strava.com
- rconti 9y agoWow. I was just playing with Strava last night and didn't realize I could build point A to point B routes because the interface is so impenetrable. (tip: search for address, then zoom the map WAY in manually, because it doesn't bother finding the address for you, click on the map to produce a dot, search for 2nd address, zoom WAY in and click to place your second dot, god help you if you don't actually know how to find the places on the map with your own two eyes). Then it automatically built a route on some of the most heavily-traveled and bike-unfriendly roads in the area. (SF Peninsula locals: Marsh Road, Middlefield bike slaughter through Palo Alto). At least it only had a few turns. Google Maps did far, far better.
- JofArnold 9y agoNot sure what Komoot uses, but I find their route planning very effective. You can indicate what kind of cyclist you are and it adjusts accordingly.
- thisiscool 9y agoWhat a great idea! I'm thinking how great this type of bike-optimized map on a dedicated bike gps unit would be.
- maxerickson 9y agoIt's a rabbit hole, but there is pretty good support for loading OpenStreetMap data onto Garmin devices (other device makers did a better job obscuring their formats): http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin I guess the routing enabled bike maps will take advantage of whatever data is present. BBBike supports custom areas: http://extract.bbbike.org/extract.html http://extract.bbbike.org/extract.html
- blt 9y agoI would buy this if it was significantly cheaper than a phone and made it easy to adjust those tuning parameters. I prefer to keep my phone protected on the bike in case of a collision / fall.
- lasryaric 9y agoI love the concept. I would love to have anentry point to cost function with the following parameters: - traffic - elevation gain - type of street - a way to represent the distance overhead compare the other segments. Any framework / dev env where I could easily get that entry point and see the top results on a map?
- burritojustice 9y agoYes -- at the bottom of the post we show how you can use our mapzen.js library to draw routes on a map. If you know Leaflet it's relatively straightforward.
- vermooten 9y agoWhy's it better than ridewithgps, which is superb?
- dfrey 9y agoIt's an interesting problem because there are so many factors and even the goal isn't constant from day to day. Goals - get from A to B as quickly as possible - get from A to B as safely as possible - get from A to B as enjoyably as possible Factors - fitness of rider - type of bike (Riding a fixed gear bike up a steep hill is bad for enjoyment, but riding a mountain bike up a steep hill is not) - weather (headwinds, tailwinds affect time, affects safety of certain routes as well - don't tell me to ride down a steep windy hill when there is a possibility of ice) - time of day (affects safety due to light levels) - traffic volume - number of lights/stop signs (this affects fast riders more than slow ones because of the effort wasted accelerating and braking is greater) - number of turns (turns make the rider slow down and wait for traffic and also increase the complexity of following a route) - scenery/environmental factors (eg. ride through an industrial area or through a waterfront park)
- konschubert 9y agoAnd it's also not said that all these factors have a linear impact on the Figure of Merit. I guess that this might be a nice application for a machine learning classifier, to rate a route's ride quality depending on all of these inputs (and more.)
- megamindbrian 9y ago"b" didn't exist 200 years ago, so why does "a" feel the need to get there? Progress for the sake of progress!
- schemathings 9y agoSo I decided to see how to get to that nice Pho place across town .. 600 Washington Ave Philadelphia, PA 19147 or the one next door at 610 Washington Ave Philadelphia, PA 19147 .. in both cases it truncates off the street number and drops me at a wrong location. Does that mean OpenStreetMap needs some assistance in that area? Even stranger if I put one of those addresses in both source and destination it does a strange 5 block loop to get back to the same wrong start point.
- maxerickson 9y agoYeah, address coverage and POI coverage are pretty spotty. The address would show on osm.org if it were in the data: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/39.93668/-75.16656 http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/39.93668/-75.16656
- aidenn0 9y agoGoogle seems to only have gotten the address coverage it has by sending vans around with cameras and then making people type in the addresses for CAPTCHAs
- maxerickson 9y agoThere is also a lot of data that has been collected by governments: http://results.openaddresses.io/ http://results.openaddresses.io/ There's a variety of reasons that such data hasn't made it to OSM (resources, licensing issues, disagreement about how it should be integrated, disagreement about whether it should be integrated, etc.)
- rmc 9y agoGoogle is also a household name, so people and companies ensure they they enter their business into Google Maps.
- brightball 9y agoLeafletJS looks interesting there for the maps. Any experiences with it here? Does it work well with PostGIS?
- aw3c2 9y agoLeaflet is for requesting and displaying raster tiles on the client. PostGIS is for storing and managing geo data. Leaflet and PostGIS do not talk to each other. Inbetween you need a tile renderer (like Mapnik). Leaflet is a great library if you don't need much (use OpenLayers then).
- abalone 9y agoI happen to know those intersections. They could have improved that wiggle route simply by rating the intersections. I'm not sure but it looks like they were not doing that. The old route crossed two stop signs and did a left turn at a traffic signal. Left turns at traffic signals really suck. The new, proper wiggle route is two left turns and a right turn, all at stop signs. Left turns at stop signs are not that much worse than going straight across -- and vastly better than a traffic light. Right turns are practically free. So by simply rating the difficulty of intersections using a global metric, it seems like they could have made the same wiggle improvement without getting into rating each section of street. My point here is not that assessing things like accomodation_factor and road_stress are useless. Rather it appears that they've overlooked the much simpler, global improvement of rating intersections.
- zten 9y agoOnly tangentially related to your post, but, two new traffic lights are being installed on the Wiggle. Haight is getting nine new lights, two of which are at Scott and Pierce. Maybe people will wiggle slightly differently to avoid the left turns at the lights.
- abalone 9y agoYeah, the SFBC (SF Bike Coalition) is not super happy about those lights. Better for the bus, which is good, but "will also cause delay for pedestrians and bicycle riders."[1] There's no good way to avoid them westbound, but we can be certain eastbound wiggle traffic will start taking Page to avoid the left turn at the Haight & Scott traffic light. And that's going to stress the notorious Scott & Page intersection even more. They're currently adding pedestrian safety improvements.[2] We'll see if it's enough. Unless.. I wonder if timed bicycle signals would help make the traffic signal routes preferable. Not sure if it would work, but that would be a dream.. just flow through the wiggle unimpeded. I can't tell if they're considering it. [1] https://www.sfmta.com/projects-planning/projects/wiggle-neighborhood-green-corridor https://www.sfmta.com/projects-planning/projects/wiggle-neig... [2] https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/projects/2017/Wiggle_Fact%20SheetV3.pdf https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/projects/2017/Wigg...
- rconti 9y agoNB: "Hybrid" bike in this context (probably) means a city/commuter bike, not an electric/human hybrid. "Hybrid" bikes used to describe upright bicycles with flat handlebars like a mountain bike, but less aggressive and narrower tires more suited to commuting than to trails. These days the industry is calling them "fitness bikes"; one presumes to avoid confusing people who think of "hybrid" as meaning battery-powered, eg in the automotive context.
- icebraining 9y agoDecathlon (one of largest sports retailers in Europe) still calls them Hybrid bikes.
- rconti 9y agoSorry, I did not clarify, this has been my experience in bike shops in the US in the past few months (I had not previously looked at bicycles in some time).
- dve 9y agoA friend has been working on a similar project for a while that allowed the rider to tailor, in great detail, the kind of route required. The algorithms involved are pretty interesting! http://zikes.website http://zikes.website
- phumbe 9y agoThat's really cool. Any chance it might eventually allow users to specify a single start/end point and a desired distance? That'd be much more useful for people who ride for sport, and even though there seem to be a few websites that generate such looped routes, they don't appear to do it particularly well.
- fcc3 9y agoI ride in London, and love https://www.cyclestreets.net/ https://www.cyclestreets.net/. There are versions for the web, android and now iPhone. It has a 'quietest route' option which I love. Android version gives you voice navigation. I put the phone in my shirt pocket and have it talk me through quiet streets avoiding the hassle of traffic. Open source. Runs on Openstreetmap data. Needs funding and promotion.