
Free, open and collaborative routing service - leonry
https://maps.openrouteservice.org
======
jka
A nice feature of this service is the ability to generate 'isochrones' \- a
visual display of how far you can travel from an origin within different time-
duration bounds.

[http://maps.openrouteservice.org/reach?n1=8.992583&n2=-79.60...](http://maps.openrouteservice.org/reach?n1=8.992583&n2=-79.600754&n3=11&a=8.998822,-79.602424&b=1f&i=0&j1=90&j2=15&k1=en-
US&k2=km)

~~~
Gys
I tried this for Lisbon, Portugal, and found it completely ignores one of the
two bridges [0]. So it makes we wonder how good this service is.

[0]
[http://maps.openrouteservice.org/reach?n1=38.757564&n2=-9.19...](http://maps.openrouteservice.org/reach?n1=38.757564&n2=-9.198647&n3=11&a=38.748243,-9.140093&b=1f&i=0&j1=90&j2=15&k1=en-
US&k2=km)

~~~
lars_francke
Could it be because three bridge is closed for cyclists?

Seems to be working when you create it for cars.

Either way it's probably a data issue and can be fixed if needed.

~~~
Gys
My stupidity indeed. Thanks for pointinng this out. I assumed cars was the
default (I changed the Panama link above). Both bridges are closed for
cyclists, but ferries cross the river as well. So the routing includes those,
very nice!

~~~
jka
I should have mentioned the bicycle setting in my link; Panama and the canal
seem like a good example to illustrate how the shape of isochrones can change
based on geographic and transport conditions (most cities will probably result
in fairly concentric circles for walking, cycling and driving).

Anyway, glad to hear that the routing takes those road usage restrictions into
consideration :)

------
erinaceousjones
Very impressive! Seems to have trouble with my address in the UK, but accepted
postcodes just fine. The ability to select not just different transport types
but sub-types (i.e. normal bike or e-bike) is very nice.

Loving the wheelchair option :-) that's not something I've seen before, but
now I've seen it - It's a blindlingly obvious accessibility feature...

------
aasasd
I'll tell you more, if you need routing for yourself then open-source OsmAnd
has offline routing on Android and, probably, iOS. Info on public transport is
not perfect but more than usable where I am. That's in addition to the tons of
information from OSM: from local businesses to features specific to maritime
navigation, flying and horse-riding.

The only thing that it misses is info on traffic load—which might be tricky to
gather for a FOSS service while critically depending on the quantity of
collected data.

------
jsiepkes
Really nice!

They appear to use a forked version of Graphhopper [1] [2] for route
calculation.

[1] [https://www.graphhopper.com/](https://www.graphhopper.com/) [2]
[https://graphhopper.com/maps](https://graphhopper.com/maps)

------
ktpsns
Wow, the user interface is very fluent. It has a lot of options, that's really
powerful. Amazing how far you can come with a Google maps-like interface in
2020.

As a German citizen, I enjoy that the basis data (only OSM?) is really good.
This seems to be a project based on the University at Heidelberg. That's a
pretty hilly area, maybe that's why they focus so much on height elevation :-)

------
mdszy
At first glance it looks quite nice compared to the other OSM routing software
I've used.

For instance, when going to a certain large hardware store, OsmAnd basically
told me to pull over off the Interstate and hoof it up to the store, instead
of actually routing me off the highway and into the parking lot.

This site seems to do it correctly, which is nice!

------
xrisk
thought this had something to do with internet routing and got excited :)

~~~
leonry
Oh, sorry! I'll try to find a better, more precise name next time :)

------
throwaway55554
This is great! Well, except for the fact it hijacks my back button and my
local map is out of date by at least 6 months.

But, I love that this is open.

------
dvtrn
I appreciate the inclusion of cycling as a transportation mode ( _glares at
Apple maps_ ) when looking for directions. Comparing two of my regular routes,
the options given are actually preferable to what Google Maps suggests (to the
point of being the routes I would normally take anyway to take advantage of
less car heavy routes).

------
cabalamat
I note that this has an API which is free but with rate limits
([https://openrouteservice.org/plans/](https://openrouteservice.org/plans/)).
Is the intention in future to have plans that charge for usage above these
limits?

~~~
leonry
I don't understand their business behind that, neither. Note however that on
GitHub
([https://github.com/GIScience/openrouteservice](https://github.com/GIScience/openrouteservice))
they mention it as a "demonstration server".

------
leonry
The OSM Wiki page on OpenRouteService
([https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenRouteService](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenRouteService))
might be worth checking out, too.

------
globular-toast
Unfortunately, Graphhopper (and this) has a problem with routing on bridleways
in Great Britain. It seems to be a very old issue but I'm still experiencing
it now. It makes it not very useful for walking in GB.

------
korethr
Darn. When I saw the title, for a second I thought this was someone else I
could get to advertise a /22 for me instead of AT&T.

But this is neat, too.

------
dboreham
Not IP packet routing then?

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DogRunner
This is really awesome!

------
edf13
Why!? Another web page hijacking my back button!!

~~~
OJFord
Agh, yeah. I can sort of see how this made sense in the early days of webapps,
but now that everyone is so conditioned to using 'apps' I think aside from it
being annnoying 'leave my browser chrome alone' behaviour that shouldn't be
allowed, sites shouldn't even want to. I doubt many people use a webapp/SPA
and click the browser back instead of the in-app back when they want in-app
navigation, these days.

~~~
shock
> I doubt many people use a webapp/SPA and click the browser back instead of
> the in-app back when they want in-app navigation, these days.

I have back/forward buttons on my mouse and I use those. Why would I move the
mouse to click an in-app navigation button instead?

~~~
thayne
Not to mention, that I also use keyboard shortcuts to navigate back, to avoid
having to move my hand to the mouse.

------
matesz
I love it!

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traverseda
Is this another one of those things like openmaptiles.com which is technically
open but they don't really provide the tooling to generate new tiles and
getting a copy of the tiles costs either thousands of dollars or you can only
get versions that are 3+ years out of date? And also none of the tools are
actually open source, or the ones that are go completely undocumented and
don't actually work?

/rant

~~~
alfman
This is all wrong!

1.) you're mixing a routing service with a tile service (just view the map). A
routing service needs always a tile service to display its result.

2.) the difference between openmaptiles and a traditional apache mod_tile is,
that you don't need a ~600GB postgress to serve the entire planet. It's pre-
rendered in vector tiles and the entire planet fits into a ~50GB mbtiles
(sqlite3) file.

3.) Generating your own mbtiles file is documentated here:
[https://openmaptiles.org/docs/generate/generate-
openmaptiles...](https://openmaptiles.org/docs/generate/generate-
openmaptiles/) and here is the belonging github repository
[https://github.com/openmaptiles/openmaptiles](https://github.com/openmaptiles/openmaptiles)

But take care, rendering the entire planet took a lot of ressources. e.b. i7
sandy bridge with raid 0 ssd will take ~1 year for planet zoom level 0 to 14.
And aws c5d.12xlarge will take 7 days only for zoom level 14.

~~~
traverseda
> that you don't need a ~600GB postgress to serve the entire planet.

That 600GB must surely include the full history? The xml dump of just the
current openstreetmap data is only ~90GB, and generally XML dumps get smaller
when you put them into a real database. That isn't a good comparison.

I could have _sworn_ the last time I checked this the docker image had
dependencies that simply were not available, either in docker or on git but I
guess I'm mis-remembering.

~~~
chippy
90GB is a bz2 _compressed_ file not raw xml

See the wiki:
[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm/full](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm/full)

~~~
traverseda
Well I suck. I'm honestly not sure how I got so wrong on this issue.

