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Comment by 2Gkashmiri | Hacker News Reader

I wish openstreetmap used elevation data for hiking. Say I want to climb to a hill back, it should calculate distance w.r.t elevation.

Right now it assumes a straight line be it on a road or up and down a mountain.

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OpenStreetMap doesn’t have any official router associated with it. (Note that the basic router on openstreetmap.org is just a tech demo.) Instead, developers are encouraged to come up with their own routers that take whatever features they feel important into account. For example, some routers based on OSM data pull in third-party publicly available elevation datasets.

The most commonly used routers for bicycle touring – Brouter and Cycle.travel – certainly take elevation into account and helped me personally out all over the world. Brouter has a hiking mode, though it is still in beta, and perhaps there are hiking-specific elevation-aware routers out there.

There's OSRM and a very good commercial routing engine from Graphopper. I believe they also offer the core features as an opensource Java routing server. For cycling it has three separate profiles favouring one route over the other and two profiles for walking and hiking. The commercial version allows multi routing and route optimisation. You give it a fleet of vehicles and a number of POIs for them to visit and it splits the work between vehicles and optimally routes them.

> Note that the basic router on openstreetmap.org is just a tech demo

Huh? On the OSM.org website you can use Graphhopper or OSRM routing engines. Both are not "tech demos", but proper real routing engines for real world use. They are hosted by volunteers, so you shouldn't rely on them to be free for everyone for ever. If you want to build a business on them, both OSRM & Graphhopper are open source & self hostable

I use osmand so that one is missing features

Brouter can be installed as a routing engine plugin for OSMAnd, it’s on the F-Droid repository. Also, recent versions of OSMAnd are elevation-aware anyway.

i did not know that. i will check it out

“OpenStreetMap” is just a dataset. Whether the app/site you’re using to do routing includes elevation in its calculations is up to that site, and plenty do. Even the routing options on openstreetmap.org are third party services.

With regards to hiking in the mountains, the difference in distance between straight line vs corrected distance is quite irrelevant though. But the elevation profile of a track is important of course. Many applications do include elevation data in route analysis.

For tracks with steepness up to 30°, the straight line distance will be off by max 15%. If it's steeper then that, the actual terrain is the thing that determines how fast you can move.

When using GraphHopper this is not the case. For hiking elevation is considered but hills are not explicitly avoided only slower for up and downhill. For bike we avoid uphill.

https://graphhopper.com/maps/ (click the dots near the bike icon for more profiles)

And the best is: everything is open source and you can easily tweak it according to your needs.

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