14 ms·

Free, open and collaborative routing service

196 points by leonry 6y ago

matesz 6y ago
I love it!
ktpsns 6y ago
Wow, the user interface is very fluent. It has a lot of options, that's really powerful. Amazing how far you can come with a Google maps-like interface in 2020. As a German citizen, I enjoy that the basis data (only OSM?) is really good. This seems to be a project based on the University at Heidelberg. That's a pretty hilly area, maybe that's why they focus so much on height elevation :-)
- aasasd 6y ago
  Apparently OSM and routing libs for OSM in general (i.e. Graphhopper I guess?) make use of elevation. I keep being surprised by elevation graphs for routes in OsmAnd: it somehow finds more variation than I've seen, in this city that's “flat as a liftman's joke”.
edf13 6y ago
Why!? Another web page hijacking my back button!!
- OJFord 6y ago
  Agh, yeah. I can sort of see how this made sense in the early days of webapps, but now that everyone is so conditioned to using 'apps' I think aside from it being annnoying 'leave my browser chrome alone' behaviour that shouldn't be allowed, sites shouldn't even want to. I doubt many people use a webapp/SPA and click the browser back instead of the in-app back when they want in-app navigation, these days.
  - shock 6y ago
    > I doubt many people use a webapp/SPA and click the browser back instead of the in-app back when they want in-app navigation, these days. I have back/forward buttons on my mouse and I use those. Why would I move the mouse to click an in-app navigation button instead?
    - thayne 6y ago
      Not to mention, that I also use keyboard shortcuts to navigate back, to avoid having to move my hand to the mouse.
  - Sayrus 6y ago
    I do like being able to use native controls to go back and forth and not having to use the application button. The same way you often use the OS back button on mobile instead of using the (usually) top-left button. I this what the original meant is that this implementation here is flawed. Once you are on the website, the back button won't bring you back to Hacker News ... ever. Even spamming the back button, you'll get stuck on the redirection to /directions which is annoying and definitely broken. This kind of redirection loops should be forbidden.
  - aasasd 6y ago
    > I doubt many people use a webapp/SPA and click the browser back instead of the in-app back when they want in-app navigation On phones, the native ‘back’ button is vastly more easy to tap than searching for where the designer placed their button this time and then likely reaching for the farthest corner of the screen, opposite of where my thumbs are. So much so that I get surprised and annoyed when a page that has fullscreen-y dialogs doesn't close them on ‘back’ but returns me to another page instead. On desktop, personally for me at least one of the hands is usually on the keyboard in the proximity of ‘backspace’, which is again a no-brainer to mash. So the same consideration applies.
    - swiley 6y ago
      I thought most phones got rid of the back button, or do you mean the one in the mobile browser chrome?
      - aasasd 6y ago
        Still there on Pixel 4, afaics. I'm certainly using it with Android 10 on my phone.
      - OJFord 6y ago
        The physical one sure, but Android has a system UI bar at the bottom (iff there aren't physical equivalents, which as you say there mostly aren't now) with back, home, and app switching buttons. I've been trying iOS for the last couple of months, and especially initially that back button was one of my most missed features; it still annoys me, I've just stopped expecting it.
  - xtiansimon 6y ago
    I'm not sure about in-app. For me I just wanted to get back to this post in HN, because the link opened in the same tab.
  - still_grokking 6y ago
    I'm using mouse gestures and I go totally crazy if I get dropped out of an app because I used the "back" gesture not even thinking about it. That's super annoying and a mayor usability bug, imho.
- laszlokorte 6y ago
  Browsers should internally replace `history.pushState` by `history.replaceState` calls if they do not happen during a click event (and even then limit the number of pushState calls to one)
  - microcolonel 6y ago
    That would be an accessibility nightmare.
    - laszlokorte 6y ago
      Why exactly? Indeed I have not thought about every detail but as I see it: - pushState is only used for overriding the default behavior, mostly to keep the url bar in sync with changing client state - pushState pollutes the browsers history - users have a mental model of how many steps/clicks they performed on a site and expect that an equal number of clicks on the back button brings them back to the beginning - users are upset if that expectation is not matched The site should not have control over the users history in the first place but for SPA it's necessary to achieve the expected behavior. But the browser should make sure that it's not misused. In the same way that pop-ups are blocked outside of whitelisted event listeners to prevent a website from polluting your screen, pushState should be blocked to prevent history pollution.
      - thayne 6y ago
        well, limiting it to just click events won't work if you navigate using the keyboard, or voice commands.
        laszlokorte 6y ago
        Well as you can say the same for popup windows which should work for keyboard navigation and voice commands as well, I assume there is a defined class of events that count as active user interaction and I assume that onload, mousemove and onresize do not fall in that category but click, keypress do. Anyway if you focus a button and press it by hitting the spacebar or enter key a javascript click event is triggered as well. So even if you would limit it to click events I guess it would for a large portion of keyboard navigation as well.
- AnonC 6y ago
  I came here to write about this. This site trashed my back navigation in certain cases and I couldn’t get back to the (external) page I was at before. I just lost my navigation history.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Click-and-hold/right click on the button and you should be able to resolve any "hijacking". I'm not sure why people complain about this, it's not hard to deal with.
  - bronco21016 6y ago
    How about mobile?
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      Doesn't tap-and-hold work?
      - bronco21016 6y ago
        Learn something new every day!
    - conradfr 6y ago
      It works on Firefox Android with both the OS and browser's back button.
- microcolonel 6y ago
  It pans the map with my back navigation mouse button too, it's so wrong. I wonder where the repository is.
DogRunner 6y ago
This is really awesome!
jka 6y ago
A nice feature of this service is the ability to generate 'isochrones' - a visual display of how far you can travel from an origin within different time-duration bounds. http://maps.openrouteservice.org/reach?n1=8.992583&n2=-79.600754&n3=11&a=8.998822,-79.602424&b=1f&i=0&j1=90&j2=15&k1=en-US&k2=km http://maps.openrouteservice.org/reach?n1=8.992583&n2=-79.60...
- Gys 6y ago
  I tried this for Lisbon, Portugal, and found it completely ignores one of the two bridges [0]. So it makes we wonder how good this service is. [0] http://maps.openrouteservice.org/reach?n1=38.757564&n2=-9.198647&n3=11&a=38.748243,-9.140093&b=1f&i=0&j1=90&j2=15&k1=en-US&k2=km http://maps.openrouteservice.org/reach?n1=38.757564&n2=-9.19...
  - lars_francke 6y ago
    Could it be because three bridge is closed for cyclists? Seems to be working when you create it for cars. Either way it's probably a data issue and can be fixed if needed.
    - Gys 6y ago
      My stupidity indeed. Thanks for pointinng this out. I assumed cars was the default (I changed the Panama link above). Both bridges are closed for cyclists, but ferries cross the river as well. So the routing includes those, very nice!
      - jka 6y ago
        I should have mentioned the bicycle setting in my link; Panama and the canal seem like a good example to illustrate how the shape of isochrones can change based on geographic and transport conditions (most cities will probably result in fairly concentric circles for walking, cycling and driving). Anyway, glad to hear that the routing takes those road usage restrictions into consideration :)
- 6y ago
erinaceousjones 6y ago
Very impressive! Seems to have trouble with my address in the UK, but accepted postcodes just fine. The ability to select not just different transport types but sub-types (i.e. normal bike or e-bike) is very nice. Loving the wheelchair option :-) that's not something I've seen before, but now I've seen it - It's a blindlingly obvious accessibility feature...
traverseda 6y ago
Is this another one of those things like openmaptiles.com which is technically open but they don't really provide the tooling to generate new tiles and getting a copy of the tiles costs either thousands of dollars or you can only get versions that are 3+ years out of date? And also none of the tools are actually open source, or the ones that are go completely undocumented and don't actually work? /rant
- alfman 6y ago
  This is all wrong! 1.) you're mixing a routing service with a tile service (just view the map). A routing service needs always a tile service to display its result. 2.) the difference between openmaptiles and a traditional apache mod_tile is, that you don't need a ~600GB postgress to serve the entire planet. It's pre-rendered in vector tiles and the entire planet fits into a ~50GB mbtiles (sqlite3) file. 3.) Generating your own mbtiles file is documentated here: https://openmaptiles.org/docs/generate/generate-openmaptiles/ https://openmaptiles.org/docs/generate/generate-openmaptiles... and here is the belonging github repository https://github.com/openmaptiles/openmaptiles https://github.com/openmaptiles/openmaptiles But take care, rendering the entire planet took a lot of ressources. e.b. i7 sandy bridge with raid 0 ssd will take ~1 year for planet zoom level 0 to 14. And aws c5d.12xlarge will take 7 days only for zoom level 14.
  - traverseda 6y ago
    > that you don't need a ~600GB postgress to serve the entire planet. That 600GB must surely include the full history? The xml dump of just the current openstreetmap data is only ~90GB, and generally XML dumps get smaller when you put them into a real database. That isn't a good comparison. I could have sworn the last time I checked this the docker image had dependencies that simply were not available, either in docker or on git but I guess I'm mis-remembering.
    - chippy 6y ago
      90GB is a bz2 compressed file not raw xml See the wiki: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm/full https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm/full
xrisk 6y ago
thought this had something to do with internet routing and got excited :)
- leonry 6y ago
  Oh, sorry! I'll try to find a better, more precise name next time :)
aasasd 6y ago
I'll tell you more, if you need routing for yourself then open-source OsmAnd has offline routing on Android and, probably, iOS. Info on public transport is not perfect but more than usable where I am. That's in addition to the tons of information from OSM: from local businesses to features specific to maritime navigation, flying and horse-riding. The only thing that it misses is info on traffic load—which might be tricky to gather for a FOSS service while critically depending on the quantity of collected data.
throwaway55554 6y ago
This is great! Well, except for the fact it hijacks my back button and my local map is out of date by at least 6 months. But, I love that this is open.
jsiepkes 6y ago
Really nice! They appear to use a forked version of Graphhopper [1] [2] for route calculation. [1] https://www.graphhopper.com/ https://www.graphhopper.com/ [2] https://graphhopper.com/maps https://graphhopper.com/maps
dboreham 6y ago
Not IP packet routing then?
cabalamat 6y ago
I note that this has an API which is free but with rate limits (https://openrouteservice.org/plans/ https://openrouteservice.org/plans/). Is the intention in future to have plans that charge for usage above these limits?
- leonry 6y ago
  I don't understand their business behind that, neither. Note however that on GitHub (https://github.com/GIScience/openrouteservice https://github.com/GIScience/openrouteservice) they mention it as a "demonstration server".
globular-toast 6y ago
Unfortunately, Graphhopper (and this) has a problem with routing on bridleways in Great Britain. It seems to be a very old issue but I'm still experiencing it now. It makes it not very useful for walking in GB.
mdszy 6y ago
At first glance it looks quite nice compared to the other OSM routing software I've used. For instance, when going to a certain large hardware store, OsmAnd basically told me to pull over off the Interstate and hoof it up to the store, instead of actually routing me off the highway and into the parking lot. This site seems to do it correctly, which is nice!
korethr 6y ago
Darn. When I saw the title, for a second I thought this was someone else I could get to advertise a /22 for me instead of AT&T. But this is neat, too.
dvtrn 6y ago
I appreciate the inclusion of cycling as a transportation mode (glares at Apple maps) when looking for directions. Comparing two of my regular routes, the options given are actually preferable to what Google Maps suggests (to the point of being the routes I would normally take anyway to take advantage of less car heavy routes).
leonry 6y ago
The OSM Wiki page on OpenRouteService (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenRouteService https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenRouteService) might be worth checking out, too.

196 points by leonry 6y ago

I love it!

Wow, the user interface is very fluent. It has a lot of options, that's really powerful. Amazing how far you can come with a Google maps-like interface in 2020. As a German citizen, I enjoy that the basis data (only OSM?) is really good. This seems to be a project based on the University at Heidelberg. That's a pretty hilly area, maybe that's why they focus so much on height elevation :-)

aasasd 6y ago
Apparently OSM and routing libs for OSM in general (i.e. Graphhopper I guess?) make use of elevation. I keep being surprised by elevation graphs for routes in OsmAnd: it somehow finds more variation than I've seen, in this city that's “flat as a liftman's joke”.

edf13 6y ago

Why!? Another web page hijacking my back button!!

OJFord 6y ago
Agh, yeah. I can sort of see how this made sense in the early days of webapps, but now that everyone is so conditioned to using 'apps' I think aside from it being annnoying 'leave my browser chrome alone' behaviour that shouldn't be allowed, sites shouldn't even want to. I doubt many people use a webapp/SPA and click the browser back instead of the in-app back when they want in-app navigation, these days.
- shock 6y ago
  > I doubt many people use a webapp/SPA and click the browser back instead of the in-app back when they want in-app navigation, these days. I have back/forward buttons on my mouse and I use those. Why would I move the mouse to click an in-app navigation button instead?
  - thayne 6y ago
    Not to mention, that I also use keyboard shortcuts to navigate back, to avoid having to move my hand to the mouse.
- Sayrus 6y ago
  I do like being able to use native controls to go back and forth and not having to use the application button. The same way you often use the OS back button on mobile instead of using the (usually) top-left button. I this what the original meant is that this implementation here is flawed. Once you are on the website, the back button won't bring you back to Hacker News ... ever. Even spamming the back button, you'll get stuck on the redirection to /directions which is annoying and definitely broken. This kind of redirection loops should be forbidden.
- aasasd 6y ago
  > I doubt many people use a webapp/SPA and click the browser back instead of the in-app back when they want in-app navigation On phones, the native ‘back’ button is vastly more easy to tap than searching for where the designer placed their button this time and then likely reaching for the farthest corner of the screen, opposite of where my thumbs are. So much so that I get surprised and annoyed when a page that has fullscreen-y dialogs doesn't close them on ‘back’ but returns me to another page instead. On desktop, personally for me at least one of the hands is usually on the keyboard in the proximity of ‘backspace’, which is again a no-brainer to mash. So the same consideration applies.
  - swiley 6y ago
    I thought most phones got rid of the back button, or do you mean the one in the mobile browser chrome?
    - aasasd 6y ago
      Still there on Pixel 4, afaics. I'm certainly using it with Android 10 on my phone.
    - OJFord 6y ago
      The physical one sure, but Android has a system UI bar at the bottom (iff there aren't physical equivalents, which as you say there mostly aren't now) with back, home, and app switching buttons. I've been trying iOS for the last couple of months, and especially initially that back button was one of my most missed features; it still annoys me, I've just stopped expecting it.
- xtiansimon 6y ago
  I'm not sure about in-app. For me I just wanted to get back to this post in HN, because the link opened in the same tab.
- still_grokking 6y ago
  I'm using mouse gestures and I go totally crazy if I get dropped out of an app because I used the "back" gesture not even thinking about it. That's super annoying and a mayor usability bug, imho.
laszlokorte 6y ago
Browsers should internally replace `history.pushState` by `history.replaceState` calls if they do not happen during a click event (and even then limit the number of pushState calls to one)
- microcolonel 6y ago
  That would be an accessibility nightmare.
  - laszlokorte 6y ago
    Why exactly? Indeed I have not thought about every detail but as I see it: - pushState is only used for overriding the default behavior, mostly to keep the url bar in sync with changing client state - pushState pollutes the browsers history - users have a mental model of how many steps/clicks they performed on a site and expect that an equal number of clicks on the back button brings them back to the beginning - users are upset if that expectation is not matched The site should not have control over the users history in the first place but for SPA it's necessary to achieve the expected behavior. But the browser should make sure that it's not misused. In the same way that pop-ups are blocked outside of whitelisted event listeners to prevent a website from polluting your screen, pushState should be blocked to prevent history pollution.
    - thayne 6y ago
      well, limiting it to just click events won't work if you navigate using the keyboard, or voice commands.
      - laszlokorte 6y ago
        Well as you can say the same for popup windows which should work for keyboard navigation and voice commands as well, I assume there is a defined class of events that count as active user interaction and I assume that onload, mousemove and onresize do not fall in that category but click, keypress do. Anyway if you focus a button and press it by hitting the spacebar or enter key a javascript click event is triggered as well. So even if you would limit it to click events I guess it would for a large portion of keyboard navigation as well.
AnonC 6y ago
I came here to write about this. This site trashed my back navigation in certain cases and I couldn’t get back to the (external) page I was at before. I just lost my navigation history.
zozbot234 6y ago
Click-and-hold/right click on the button and you should be able to resolve any "hijacking". I'm not sure why people complain about this, it's not hard to deal with.
- bronco21016 6y ago
  How about mobile?
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    Doesn't tap-and-hold work?
    - bronco21016 6y ago
      Learn something new every day!
  - conradfr 6y ago
    It works on Firefox Android with both the OS and browser's back button.
microcolonel 6y ago
It pans the map with my back navigation mouse button too, it's so wrong. I wonder where the repository is.

DogRunner 6y ago

This is really awesome!

jka 6y ago

A nice feature of this service is the ability to generate 'isochrones' - a visual display of how far you can travel from an origin within different time-duration bounds. http://maps.openrouteservice.org/reach?n1=8.992583&n2=-79.600754&n3=11&a=8.998822,-79.602424&b=1f&i=0&j1=90&j2=15&k1=en-US&k2=km http://maps.openrouteservice.org/reach?n1=8.992583&n2=-79.60...

Gys 6y ago
I tried this for Lisbon, Portugal, and found it completely ignores one of the two bridges [0]. So it makes we wonder how good this service is. [0] http://maps.openrouteservice.org/reach?n1=38.757564&n2=-9.198647&n3=11&a=38.748243,-9.140093&b=1f&i=0&j1=90&j2=15&k1=en-US&k2=km http://maps.openrouteservice.org/reach?n1=38.757564&n2=-9.19...
- lars_francke 6y ago
  Could it be because three bridge is closed for cyclists? Seems to be working when you create it for cars. Either way it's probably a data issue and can be fixed if needed.
  - Gys 6y ago
    My stupidity indeed. Thanks for pointinng this out. I assumed cars was the default (I changed the Panama link above). Both bridges are closed for cyclists, but ferries cross the river as well. So the routing includes those, very nice!
    - jka 6y ago
      I should have mentioned the bicycle setting in my link; Panama and the canal seem like a good example to illustrate how the shape of isochrones can change based on geographic and transport conditions (most cities will probably result in fairly concentric circles for walking, cycling and driving). Anyway, glad to hear that the routing takes those road usage restrictions into consideration :)
6y ago

erinaceousjones 6y ago

Very impressive! Seems to have trouble with my address in the UK, but accepted postcodes just fine. The ability to select not just different transport types but sub-types (i.e. normal bike or e-bike) is very nice. Loving the wheelchair option :-) that's not something I've seen before, but now I've seen it - It's a blindlingly obvious accessibility feature...

traverseda 6y ago

Is this another one of those things like openmaptiles.com which is technically open but they don't really provide the tooling to generate new tiles and getting a copy of the tiles costs either thousands of dollars or you can only get versions that are 3+ years out of date? And also none of the tools are actually open source, or the ones that are go completely undocumented and don't actually work? /rant

alfman 6y ago
This is all wrong! 1.) you're mixing a routing service with a tile service (just view the map). A routing service needs always a tile service to display its result. 2.) the difference between openmaptiles and a traditional apache mod_tile is, that you don't need a ~600GB postgress to serve the entire planet. It's pre-rendered in vector tiles and the entire planet fits into a ~50GB mbtiles (sqlite3) file. 3.) Generating your own mbtiles file is documentated here: https://openmaptiles.org/docs/generate/generate-openmaptiles/ https://openmaptiles.org/docs/generate/generate-openmaptiles... and here is the belonging github repository https://github.com/openmaptiles/openmaptiles https://github.com/openmaptiles/openmaptiles But take care, rendering the entire planet took a lot of ressources. e.b. i7 sandy bridge with raid 0 ssd will take ~1 year for planet zoom level 0 to 14. And aws c5d.12xlarge will take 7 days only for zoom level 14.
- traverseda 6y ago
  > that you don't need a ~600GB postgress to serve the entire planet. That 600GB must surely include the full history? The xml dump of just the current openstreetmap data is only ~90GB, and generally XML dumps get smaller when you put them into a real database. That isn't a good comparison. I could have sworn the last time I checked this the docker image had dependencies that simply were not available, either in docker or on git but I guess I'm mis-remembering.
  - chippy 6y ago
    90GB is a bz2 compressed file not raw xml See the wiki: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm/full https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm/full

xrisk 6y ago

thought this had something to do with internet routing and got excited :)

leonry 6y ago
Oh, sorry! I'll try to find a better, more precise name next time :)

aasasd 6y ago

I'll tell you more, if you need routing for yourself then open-source OsmAnd has offline routing on Android and, probably, iOS. Info on public transport is not perfect but more than usable where I am. That's in addition to the tons of information from OSM: from local businesses to features specific to maritime navigation, flying and horse-riding. The only thing that it misses is info on traffic load—which might be tricky to gather for a FOSS service while critically depending on the quantity of collected data.

throwaway55554 6y ago

This is great! Well, except for the fact it hijacks my back button and my local map is out of date by at least 6 months. But, I love that this is open.

jsiepkes 6y ago

Really nice! They appear to use a forked version of Graphhopper [1] [2] for route calculation. [1] https://www.graphhopper.com/ https://www.graphhopper.com/ [2] https://graphhopper.com/maps https://graphhopper.com/maps

dboreham 6y ago

Not IP packet routing then?

cabalamat 6y ago

I note that this has an API which is free but with rate limits (https://openrouteservice.org/plans/ https://openrouteservice.org/plans/). Is the intention in future to have plans that charge for usage above these limits?

leonry 6y ago
I don't understand their business behind that, neither. Note however that on GitHub (https://github.com/GIScience/openrouteservice https://github.com/GIScience/openrouteservice) they mention it as a "demonstration server".

globular-toast 6y ago

Unfortunately, Graphhopper (and this) has a problem with routing on bridleways in Great Britain. It seems to be a very old issue but I'm still experiencing it now. It makes it not very useful for walking in GB.

mdszy 6y ago

At first glance it looks quite nice compared to the other OSM routing software I've used. For instance, when going to a certain large hardware store, OsmAnd basically told me to pull over off the Interstate and hoof it up to the store, instead of actually routing me off the highway and into the parking lot. This site seems to do it correctly, which is nice!

korethr 6y ago

Darn. When I saw the title, for a second I thought this was someone else I could get to advertise a /22 for me instead of AT&T. But this is neat, too.

dvtrn 6y ago

I appreciate the inclusion of cycling as a transportation mode (glares at Apple maps) when looking for directions. Comparing two of my regular routes, the options given are actually preferable to what Google Maps suggests (to the point of being the routes I would normally take anyway to take advantage of less car heavy routes).

leonry 6y ago

The OSM Wiki page on OpenRouteService (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenRouteService https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenRouteService) might be worth checking out, too.