In its desire to avoid busy roads, the Journey Planner sometimes finds complicated cycling routes that have many turns. We have come to talk of this problem as wiggliness.
We’ve started work on changing the journey planner so that it finds a better balance between the quietness of a route and the number of turns. The first step has been to define a way of measuring the wiggliness.
We have chosen a simple percentage score, dividing the number of turns in a route by the total number of junctions. This means a route can score between 0%, for a route that goes straight on at every junction, to 100% where a turn is made at every opportunity.
This score is now included on the summary of the journey listing pages, and we’ll use these figures when we receive route feedback to help us monitor the quality of routes.
