Planning Quirk
I tried to create a route using the right-click context menu to select my destination, and then using it again to select a starting point. After clicking plan I get a route that looks reasonable (it goes from the starting point to the destination). But when I click on the Drive button the route changes and the starting point becomes my current location.
That behavior seems both right and wrong. Right because it is the route from my current location to my destination, but wrong because it seems possible that someone might be starting from a place where “you can’t get there from here” (say a position in a “roadless” area, or on a beach where cars are allowed, but which is far from the nearest access point) so they want to start the route from a point that is on the road network. I’m assuming that ABRP would fail to create a route in this case. Maybe when the starting point and the current location aren’t “close enough” (and especially if a route can’t be found to the starting point) ABRP should ask if it should replan from the current location and if the user says “no” display something like “Proceed to starting point” and maybe give a vector to the starting point.
The plans below show the problem. My use case was to try to get ABRP to show me the guidance that it would have displayed at the start of the first route. The second one was a test to see if picking “sensible” start and end positions would change the behavior.
https://abetterrouteplanner.com/?plan_uuid=3451d560-dbce-4520-bcc1-236420962c92
https://abetterrouteplanner.com/?plan_uuid=49758f62-b8d6-4dd1-beeb-7ab4cbbebf79
- Where does this happen?
- ABRP version number (found at bottom of settings menu)
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Comments2
Matt (ABRP)
Aug 20, 2025
Can you please send us a screen recording where this happens, I cannot reproduce it or perhaps I’m misunderstanding the behaviour?
ABRP User #811399
Aug 20, 2025
I can’t easily make a screen recording that shows the issue well, but let me see if I can describe the problem better. I think I can now that you’ve asked for the screen recording and I had to think about where I could make one that would demonstrate the problem. Here goes:
In ABRP you can plan a route between two arbitrary points. But when you actually start navigating, ABRP seems to update your starting point to your actual location. There are real-life situations where that’s not desirable behavior.
In the screen capture below, you can see a gate on 18th Street NW near the center of the screen. The gate is usually locked.
Let’s say that I live on the west side of the gate and plan a trip to a location on the east side of the gate. The route will be something like this:
That’s reasonable, because ABRP doesn’t know that I can open the gate. So, I can select a starting point on the other side of the gate and get a route like this:
The problem comes when I actually try to drive that route. ABRP will update my starting point to my current location on the west side of the gate and recalculate the route and I’ll end up being routed the long way around.
Since ABRP has no way of know that I can open the gate that’s generally reasonable seeming behavior. But it’s not so reasonable if you’re trying to find a way to get good guidance when you know that you can open the gate.
I think a reasonable fix might be to have ABRP prompt the user to ask if it should recalculate the route when it notices that the starting point of the route & the current location are different. If the user says “no” then ABRP could begin the navigation guidance with “proceed to starting point.”
An even nicer solution, in the specific case of gates or other obstructions that can be bypassed with authorization, would be to prompt the user to find out if they could open gates that are encountered as ABRP searches for a route. Or to allow the user to “tell” ABRP that they can open particular gates, maybe by doing something like setting guide points at gates you can open.
This is obviously a trivial example, but I think it illustrates the problems that can occur by always updating the starting point selected by the user.