E-mail has been mad today on the first full working day after Friday afternoon’s go live.
Lots of positive feedback has been flowing in but also several comments about unexpected routes being generated.
In particular the Journey Planner does not yet understand hills, so it doesn’t mind sending you up a long hill on a quiet road if that seems a lot quieter than a shorter section of flat road. We have got plans to take account of this, but as the system grew up in Cambridge which is very flat its not found its way into this inital release.
The other main feedback about routing has been that it does unexpected things. This is mostly because the map data for an area is incomplete. We know data for Cambridge is excellent, and also very good for London, but other areas like Oxford are only just getting filled in to the required level of detail by the OpenStreetMap.org (OSM) project.
The system is also not yet making full use of all the tags in the OSM data – e.g. where some one-way streets are two -way for cycling. I thought I’d done this but its not picking up some cases so I shall have to look again.
We’ve had some reports saying that the routes the system is generating are exactly what people are already using and that is very pleasing. But we do know that hills, traffic lights and banned turns are all priorities for improving the routing system.
