Nicely written article, but the writer failed to do any research on practical solutions for route planning. "The result of such an explosion is that problems,

Nicely written article, but the writer failed to do any research on practical solutions for route planning. "The result of such an explosion is that problems, like shortest path problems, grow so quickly as to become practically incomputable, taking a practically infinite amount of time to solve." This is exactly the reason why neither Dijkstra nor a variant thereof is a feasible solution for real-world route planning (we would be talking about hours instead of ms per query). However, variants of Dijkstra are used in the pre-computational steps for the actual routing algorithms like Contraction Hierarchies or Transit Node Routing.