Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know how solvable a problem this is. There are two roads that would be labeled nearly identically that are an option for my commute. Let's call them Road A and Road B.

Road A: 45MPH, with a dedicated bike lane with no barrier.

Road B: 40MPH with a dedicated bike lane with no barrier.

The similarities end there though:

Road A: Many turns with trees providing poor visibility

Road B: Relatively straight, good visibility

Road A: Typically has obstructions in the bike lane

Road B: Typically no obstructions in the bike lane

Road A: People speed rather massively

Road B: Many traffic signals; people who speed tend to take parallel Road A instead to avoid the signals.

Road A: The bike lane is sometimes only 30cm wide

Road B: The bike lane is wide enough to ride 2 abreast, and there is usually an additional 30cm painted area between you and traffic.

Road A: Car v. bike accidents are fairly regular, with multiple fatalities in the time I've lived here.

Road B: Every car v. bike accident I'm aware of was at night and involved an intoxicated driver.

I have 3 parallel options for going in this direction, in order of increasing total distance for traveled: Road A, Road B, and a MUP (i.e. combination bike/pedestrian path).

For obvious reasons, I prefer Road B, but it's hard to label a map in such a way that it won't pick the two best choices as Road A (shortest) the MUP (avoid highways).

The regional planning organization in my area uses a metric called Level of Traffic Stress: https://www.dvrpc.org/webmaps/bike-lts/

And they made a routing tool based on this: https://www.dvrpc.org/ruti/

Using the metric from the documentation[1] they would both be LTS-3 with Road B varying from 42% to 60% and Road A at 50%:

Both are over 35MPH; Road A is 2 lanes with an unbuffered bike lane and Road B is 4 lanes with most (but not all) stretches having a buffered bike lane.

1: https://www.dvrpc.org/webmaps/bike-lts/pdf/bikestressdocumen...

Have you tried OpenStreetMap? You can add many details like the width and quality of the bike lanes, and many routers take that into account.

What does "have you tried OSM" mean? If I understand the thread, they're talking about the feasibility of "safe/annoyance-free" bike routing. Are you suggesting apps like OSMAnd? Or are you suggesting that they simply complete the map for their areas of interest?

OsmAnd is very good, but also fitness apps like strava offen use OSM data. By adding more detailed data, you could influence their routing.

I think part of the solution is to allow users to add personal weights to different roads. Obviously the shortcoming with this is it only works if you already know the area, when one of the major features of navigation systems is navigating an area you don’t know. So it doesn’t solve the general problem, but it would lets individual users massively improve their own experience with the navigation system.

If you already know the area, why would you need your nav to direct you to the alternative route instead of just driving it?

Road closures or traffic jams?

My navigation apps keep up with those better than I can.

Because traffic can be very variable and there are always reckless drivers crashing their cars and blocking roads. And the geography in my area is such that once I’m on a route, I can’t really go another way without going all the way back.

Often I’ll prefer a slightly longer route over another, but if it’s much longer time wise because of bad traffic then I’ll go with my second choice. But navigation apps will almost always suggest the fastest way, even if it’s only an estimated minute faster.

Apple Maps will suggest multiple routes if they’re close in estimated time, but I’d like to weight some of them more heavily such that they might still be the preferred route even if it’s 10 minutes slower since it’s simply more pleasant safer.

Is there a dataset of traffic accidents? If there is I'd definitely prefer navigation to take that into account!

some cities/counties have (and publish) bike friendly commuting maps.

Sort of like maps with the road B's highlighted.

don't see why this data can't make it into maps, like A B C roads for cars.

My city has this, and Road A and Road B are listed in the same category :/

I wonder if “ghost bikes” belong in a bike map. Someone died on a bike here. If you’re on a bike maybe be extra careful, maybe avoid this street next time.

Deaths are the most clear-cut data, but close-calls will be more numerous and thus less noisy. Either way it would need to be adjusted for cyclist volume.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com