[Geowanking] Re: routing for bicycles

[Reid Priedhorsky]

jessica forbess wrote:
> Hey, I'm a GIS noob, but I was recently overcome with a desire to see
> a bicycle directions button on the Google Maps page, so I started to
> poke around to see what has been done in terms of bicycling routing,
> and open source routing in general.

Hi Jessica,

I'm not sure where you're located, but my research group is working on a 
fairly advanced bicycle route-planning system, focusing on 
Minneapolis-St. Paul for now. We'll have community features as Rich 
suggested and lots of other great stuff. We hope to be live this fall, 
and it will be open source eventually.

As others have noted, the routing is easy (A* search is preferable to 
Dijkstra's algorithm) but getting the data is hard. Even if you have the 
locations of all the bike facilities, those aren't necessarily the best 
ways to go, and a good route depends on individual purpose and 
preferences as well. It's actually a rather hard problem.

If you like, I'd be happy to send you updates on our system once things 
start getting interesting.

Take care,

Reid