route planning with Osmand

[Kevin McLaughlin]

To allow me to route plan without the aid of cell service or wifi

access, (getting ready for a trip to Alaska, and much of the trip

has no cell service/wifi access), I created a sparse pbf file

of the North American continent(only contains roads down to

the level of tertiary. Basically residential and lower roads are filtered

out with osmfilter. Then created an north_america_sparse.obf

using the sparse pbf. ( 16 hours of cpu time on my laptop.)

Using this, OsmAnd can calculate an accurate route of 8550km

( from my house in Florida to Deadhorse, Alaska)

in about 3 minutes. Of course OsmAnd warned me to add additional

way points if route not calulated after 10 minutes, but it was able

to compute the route in less than three minutes.

What I mean by accurate is that when I overlay

the created track with tracks created online with the various web

base route planners, in most cases there is a perfect match, sometimes

a very short section of the track choose to go through a city, or around

a city. Not wrong just different.

Few years back, on some forum, I saw a

request by someone for a route-able world_map.obf. This is kind of

what I did here. I guess I hoping that eventually sparse obf data for

entire continents would be available from the various sources for

obf map data. Or perhaps this data is already available and I'm just

not aware of it.

One of my favorite very simple nav apps is Amap. It's meant for

hiking, but I can import that 8550km route into it and use

Amap as an emergency backup navigation system. What a disaster

it would be if in the middle of nowhere, I accidentally delete my imported

route. So not being  able to create a route in the absence of cell service/wifi is a

safety of life issue so I've been pursing this.

Kevin