At present, we've a couple of areas of work that we've been prioritising, to address known weaknesses with the system.
Firstly, we've been working to reduce the 'wigglyness' of some routes. The problem is that the journey planner engine does not yet take account of turn delays. Once this is finally rolled out, routes will be straighter and easier to remember.
Secondly, and following our recent Developer Day, it was very clear that we need to rewrite the core network traversal algorithm in a more efficient programming language, and we've started some exploratory work on this. The effect of this will ultimately be to speed up the route planning considerably, and to enable us to add long-awaited features like draggable way-points. It will also mean that we can tackle more quickly problems where the weighting of the data is wrong – e.g. how the engine sometimes gives busy roads when that is potentially avoidable. These are all things which we will address before moving out of 'beta'.
Thirdly, we're keen to address user interface issues, particularly increasing the map size and de-cluttering some screens such as the itinerary result page. If you are a user interface designer who could help us with this, please do get in touch!
Lastly, we're working hard to get more funding. The project so far has been achieved on under £12,000, and our two main developers have worked entirely unpaid so far. Our main target is to get 1 full-time plus two half-time funded developer positions for 12-18 months, so that the project can then be self-sustaining. This will enable us to enable us to ramp up routing quality much more quickly – including adding more attributes in – and to implement new, innovative features faster.
2 thoughts to “Current priorities”
Can we have an option to keep the wiggles in, please? For one-off trips I agree that wiggliness is not desirable, but when planning a regular route (to work, for instance) I want the best (for me = quietest) route and I quite like a bit of wiggling…
What you have done with a budget of just £12,000 is amazing. And when you compare it to the £2.4m the government has spent on a similar project, one can easily see that interested communities work much more efficiently than large budget central government.