On 5/3/07, Paul Ramsey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 3-May-07, at 12:19 PM, jessica forbess wrote: > The PGDijkstra routing engine mentioned is interesting. And the > pgRouting that is based on it. I haven't looked at those closely, but > I just thought I'd see if anyone here knew of a good place to start, > given my goal is open source routing for bicycles. The key is not so much software as data. What distinguishes bike routing from car routing? Knowing what existing automotive roads are good to bike, and knowing supplementary information about connections (bike paths, cut throughs, walkways) are available to bikes that are not available to cars. Without that, the routing software is moot.
California is releasing ESRI data regarding official bike lanes, paths and wide shoulders. I believe Oregon is as well. How does one pull that data into a routing database? I don't know, but it was done for cars, and is still being refined for them, so I can do it for bicycles. Other sites like bikely.com may supply useful data (probably after significant massaging). That site allows users to store bike routes either by uploading gps tracks or just clicking on the map a la gmap pedometer. Not so easy to take that to a routing database, but a stepping stone. A similar site dedicated to collecting data for routing could be set up. I'm also curious how one could integrate topography information with a routing database to take hills into account. Obviously one can't do the whole world immediately, but one can start in SF/Boston/Austin and expand. (Places I've lived and/or biked.) jess
P _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
_______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
