Routing quality work

Here's a view of the latest work in progress to improve the quality of the routes offered. It shows the routemaster's view of the cycling network of South London.

The screenshot is from one of a range of back-end tools which help us work on the complex task of debugging the routing engine.

The yellow colour roads are mostly residential with quietness of around 80 – 90%. The green are 100% and the red around 70%. Busier roads are blue or grey, and trunk roads are not shown at all.

The green routes form a (rather sparse) cell-like grid which is very quiet for cycling. This is an alternative to the blue / grey grid, which is relatively hostile to cycling.

This map has been generated from our work to make greater use of the tagging schemes in OSM to provide better data for cycling routes. We are now taking into account the implied tags from the OSM wiki pages, and adding our own inferences. This is resulting in a wider vocabulary for defining routing quality than the earlier system which was based on a limited set of 'provision' types.