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Allow users to enable the use of 'track' (dirt) roads in planning

Feature Requests

Selection of roads in Australia

ABRP has great difficulty planning the most direct trip using secondary and dirt roads in Western Australia and when I force it to pick these roads using many waypoints it says it will take over three hours to travel 25km. In reality it will only take around 20 minutes to travel this distance.

https://abetterrouteplanner.com/?plan_uuid=b6b1a6c3-006a-46f8-9c42-b945cd842015

Posted by simon matthews ·
Status: In Review1 comment

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Comments1

  • Katya S.

    Team•

    Nov 27, 2024

    Hi @simon matthews,

    The problem here is that roads annotated as 'track' are not considered part of the general-purpose road network and, generally speaking should be avoided because not all of them are drivable for cars - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway=track?uselang=en-GB

    Our routing engine will use tracks if and only if there is literally no other way. E.g. route starts and ends on a track road. (So this is why you’re able to force ABRP to use them by adding more waypoints).

    There are different types of tracks - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:tracktype?uselang=en-GB

    and unfortunately a really big segment of that road has no tracktype - https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/47025687 , where we imply speed 5 km/h. This explains why we think it would take so long.

    Overall we apply these speeds;

    "tracktype": "grade1" -> 20 
    "tracktype": "grade2" -> 15 
    "tracktype": "grade3" -> 12 
    "tracktype": "grade4" -> 10 
    "tracktype" is not set -> 5

    To conclude;

    • There’s obviously some data missing in openstreetmap.org where no tracktype is set. This can be corrected in OSM.

    • There could even be other inaccuracies since you say that driving those stretches would be much faster. If the roads have been improved and no edits have been made to reflect this, it could also be edited in OSM.

    • However, since we generally, by default, avoid these types of roads as they’re not considered drivable by standard vehicles - we would still try to avoid track roads in order to provide safer alternatives. With that said, we fully understand that there are users driving vehicles capable of handling such roads and a future alternative could be to implement a toggle to let the user allow the use of track roads in planning.

    I’ll move this ticket to feature requests for evaluation.