v4.13 router profile for cross country skiing: make it less strict for walking sections
In v4.13 a router profile for cross country skiing has been added. It is really strict, which I like concerning e.g. oneway pistes, but it's IMHO too strict concerning short walks – considering it's quite comfortable to walk with back & cross country ski boots and I am unable to mix sections of different profiles in one route 🙊 making it quite inconvenient to manually fill the gaps with other profiles (recommendation in the annocuncing blog post).
For example, in https://link.locusmap.app/r/r34rug it prefers to send me 22km more instead of walking 100m:
While in this case, the root cause is that the existing piste is not imported (see Sledge piste only displayed green for ways, not relations), the behaviour also exists at other places. In such cases, I'd prefer if the router would ask me "There are 2 gaps of 100m in total. Do you want to walk them or strictly stay on piste but have 22km more distance?" or simply assume I wanna walk distances <500m (if no barrier like a fence, cliff or river is mapped there) and display a point with some warning icon on each walking passage, so I become aware and can look into details.
At https://link.locusmap.app/r/hko7fp at point 2, the two pistes with inverse directions are in fact accessible from each other, so no need to continue further east. IMHO if pistes are closer than around 25m to each other and no barrier (see above) is mapped in between them, it is sufficiently likely both can reached from each other to let the OSM data import for router insert a connection between both pistes.
I like this idea 
Hello, Georg. Well-spotted indeed. The problem with relations not being evaluated both on maps and for routing does exist and we are going to fix that. The strict nature of nordic-skiing profile is also something we do know about of course, but: Due to the nature of routing algorithms, any hard-coded constants (e.g. distance < 500 m), or logic saying "short hops are ok" are tricky to implement and rather bad practice IMHO. To simply allow for nordic-skiing roads that we know nothing about (even with high penalty) is IMHO also bad - if we do that without a warning to users. So the answer is, as we see it: to build a more generic system of warnings. Examples: if there is no other way for a casual walker to reach a place than over a high SAC-graded segment, routing is calculated, but warning issued. If there is a segment for nordic-skiing where walking may or may not be necessary, let us use it, but again, warning signal must be in place.
Hello, Georg. Well-spotted indeed. The problem with relations not being evaluated both on maps and for routing does exist and we are going to fix that. The strict nature of nordic-skiing profile is also something we do know about of course, but: Due to the nature of routing algorithms, any hard-coded constants (e.g. distance < 500 m), or logic saying "short hops are ok" are tricky to implement and rather bad practice IMHO. To simply allow for nordic-skiing roads that we know nothing about (even with high penalty) is IMHO also bad - if we do that without a warning to users. So the answer is, as we see it: to build a more generic system of warnings. Examples: if there is no other way for a casual walker to reach a place than over a high SAC-graded segment, routing is calculated, but warning issued. If there is a segment for nordic-skiing where walking may or may not be necessary, let us use it, but again, warning signal must be in place.
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