Quick update about my bike routing application: The cycle routing now works for Australia, New Zealand, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar (Burma), Bangladesh, Turkey, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea. Bicycle routing also works for the handful of South Pacific island nations I’ve tried, such as Fiji.
Some observations:
- New Zealand bicycle routing only works for intracity locations — traveling from Auckland to Wellington, for example, results in a route failure. I don’t know if that’s because bikes are prohibited on the national highways, or if the OSM data needs tweaking.
- I don’t know why, but routing also doesn’t pick up the interisland ferry services between North Island and South Island in New Zealand, although the data is there in OSM. This might be because the ferries seem to be connected directly to those national highways.
- It seems odd to me that routing works in every southeast Asian nation except Malaysia.
- Bicycle routing in Fiji is interesting, but seems almost pointless. You can cycle across each of the larger islands in about a day. Take two days if you’re on “Fiji Time.”
- Why Borneo, but not China, Japan or Korea?
- For fun, try finding a route from Melbourne, Victoria Australia to Tasmania.
Remember, the routes are only as good as the data in OpenStreetMap. The most common issue I’ve found for US routes — several paths seem to be imported as GPS tracks, but then whoever imported them didn’t bother to connect the tracks to nearby streets. If the paths aren’t connected, MapQuest won’t route you on them.
If you see problems or errors like that, please feel free to find the spot in OSM and fix it.
My TODO:
- Mobile version. I’ve started hacking away at this already but it currently stinks. Sorry.
- OSM bike paths. Right now, when you click the “Show bike paths” button, you only see the bike paths Google Maps knows about, which is pretty useless if you’re looking at Christchurch, New Zealand. I’ve started work on a program that grabs bike path data from OSM so then the paths are available to view on my map for any location.
- Easy Edit. I keep nagging you to fix and add bike facility information at OSM, but I don’t exactly make it easy for you. I’ll add a button so you can go directly to a map editor if you find something to fix.
- Waypoints. Yes, I’d like to have a way to add waypoints as well as you do.
- Draggable route. I need to think about how to do this, but this would come after the waypoints feature.
- Markers. The Markers feature is kind of broken right now — click on a route step and you’ll see the point marked on the map, but there’s no way to make it go away right now. I’d also like the reverse — click on the route on the map, and see the nearest step highlighted.
See also:
- OSM bike path tutorial
- MapQuest adds worldwide bike directions
- Compare Google, MapQuest bike maps
- Fiji bicycle club
