Points of Interest

After some months of abstinence, I updated Navit from SVN and had a closer look of what has changed. Navit supports different “vehicle” types (such as car, bike, horse and pedestrian) for a while now. Meanwhile it also supports vehicleprofiles. A vehicleprofile can be linked to a vehicle and contains roadprofiles. This way it is possible to define which ways a “vehicle” uses for routing. It is even possible to pass speed and routing weight parameters to a roadprofile. This actually means that one can define the routing behaviour via Navit’s configuration file, navit.xml. I immediately started to play with it to get bike routing:

Bike routing in Navit

It was plain fun to route through forests using tracks and even paths. The day that my N810 can route me back home the fastest way when being trapped by some thunderstorm came much closer now. There is a small limitation, though. Navit splits a route to calculate into three. The first and third section use smaller roads. But the middle section tries to send you to some major roads, to reduce resource consumption on small devices and to grant you a convenient travel on longer trips.

Unfortunately this means that Navit often creates some deviation not suitable for pedestrian and bike routing, where you rather want the shortest than the “fastest” route. In the above screenshot, the route Navit found is not that bad, except that it is not the shortest route, though it uses tracks and cycleways. In fact, I found a situation where Navit sent me a huge deviation of some kilometers, because it wanted to avoid the direct connection via a service way.

But anyway, it’s a huge improvement and already creates useful routes. I remember that Navit was uncapable to use anything less than service ways for routing last spring. Nowadays it can use all types of ways, and you can directly influence the routing without the need of a recompilation. Cool stuff.

What still is missing is that it cannot route over nonexisting ways so I can map them for openstreetmap.org (just kidding ;-) .

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 21st, 2009 at 1:08 and is filed under Gadgets, Openstreetmap, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.