Recommended route service

[Massimo]

Hi,

I was always using online route services when the local routing still was bad at long distances and in order to save some ressources on small hardware. This was of course only possible if network connection was available.

Today the local routing of Osmand has improved. I still like to use online routing. But which service is recommended, YOURS or Openrouteservice? Sometimes both were leading through crowded cities instead of circumventing.

Then some different question: Are there any plans to add some real-time traffic detection into Osmand and is there already a service available for this, beside the known radio broadcast techniques used by stand-alone navigation systems.

Best regards,
Massimo

[Stephan75]

I have no information about additional traffic information being planned to be introduce in Osmand.

But be aware:

The database of http://openrouteservice.org is OUTDATED !!! The lag is even more than one year now!

We shozld think about disabling ORS.org as online provider, or at least to display a warning when a user is selecting it.

Stephan

[Massimo]

Interesting. I was not aware that ORS is outdated. That should definitly give a warning in Osmand if not dropping it completely.
Even on their website there is no information about the service being canceled or outdated. To be honest the routing on webtheir site does not work currently, but I thought is might be caused by some scripts blocked in my browser and I could not find a solution.

So YOURS is the only "online" routing service currently? If making that the default and if is is reliable then just make the selection "online"/"offline" available in Osmand for not confusing with different "online" services if there are no alternatives...

Moreover I would be very happy about some live traffic warning and rerouting - feature. Maybe start a user election, I would rate such a feature for even for Osmand+ by far the highest, over 3D capabilities or other gimmicks or nice-to-haves.

Best regards and thanks for Osmand,
Massimo

[Max]

Even on their website there is no information about the service being canceled or outdated.

Have a look at the upper right corner:

OSM-Data for Routing: 29.10.12

Regards,
Max

[Rodolfo]

Is there any good reason to keep this service available in Osmand?

[Harry van der Wolf]

2013/11/18 Rodolfo <rodo...@gmail.com>

Is there any good reason to keep this service available in Osmand?

Even though they are outdated I still think it is useful for those who want to use online navigation. If you make a long trip over motorways and trunks than not much is really changing in the maps. A 4-lane roads gets a 6-lane road, every here and there a roundabout occurs instead of a crossing.

The fact that we are now used to new OsmAnd maps every 10-11 days (normally), doesn't mean that those mentioned roads change quickly.

For those planning a long trip from e.g. Denmark to Italy, or the Netherlands to Spain, which is currently not even possible using offline mode in OsmAnd, can still use the online service over big roads that don't change too much anyway.

Finally: In "the old days" we had roadmaps of possibly 3, 4, 5 years in our cars. So an online service of "only" 2 years old is not too bad compared with the paper map of 3-5 years old.
And sometimes read by a passenger who made it even worse :)

Harry

[Massimo]

It is not said, that older maps are not useful or that online route services are not required at all. It is only discussed which service is reliable and recommended. For long distance routing I also prefer the calculation on servers more than on my small device.

But then I'm not sure what happens if using the online route service with outdated maps together with up-to-date maps on Osmand. So the routing says straight while my local map has a round-about between?
Even worse if those maps external and local are not in-sync.

Best regards,
Massimo

[Stephan75]

If we will keep OpenRouteService in Osmand app, can someone at least do a pull request in Osmand's github to rename the entry to "OpenRouteService (outdated)" ?

and:

is there an easy way to integrate teh routing features of http://graphhopper.com

Stephan

[Rodolfo]

Just sent a pull request. Added "(outdated map data)"

[Rodolfo]

Some info about the current map age of online routing services:
ORS: 29-10-2012
OSRM: daily refreshed
YOURS: 10-02-2013

See: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing/online_routers
This table also seems to be a bit outdated. Such as Osmand does no longer offer Cloudmade, and more details.
Note that the table says that all (Osmand selectable) services support waypoints, but I can only use OSRM for a route with waypoints.
Is this an interaction issue or a lack of waypoint support by YOURS and ORS?

[Rodolfo]

>> "is there an easy way to integrate the routing features of Graphhopper?"

I contacted the developer about incorporating this service in Osmand. In his answer, he said, that the service provides routing profiles for car, bicycle and pedestrian and shortest/fastest route. But no waypoints, avoid... or prefer... options. 

Further he wrote: "The online service cannot be used from a third party. You'll have to setup your own, but this is not difficult. Tomorrow I'll release a blog post on 

http://karussell.wordpress.com/ where I explain this in more detail for the world wide case."

This post is released with detailed technical info for setting up your own server, so have a look at the blog if you are interested.

[Massimo]

After all I noticed this OSRM which I did not notice before. I tried and like it. Did not try with waypoints since I don't use that often.
The whole OSRM project seems quite interesting, also their own map service http://map.project-osrm.org which shows the impressive fast routing.

For Osmand the only issue with OSRM is that it only works for car routing. I guess Osmand itself is using the OSRM map service which also only offers car routing (fastest). In general I guess OSRM could also perform other routing if there is an appropriate installation site of OSRM. Maybe one day Osmand has the capability and resources to offer some own routing service using the OSRM sources.

Best regards.