What’s New in OpenRouteService

We have recently rolled out new features in OpenRouteService. In this blog post, we give a short overview of the most interesting changes and improvements.

Over years we constantly receive a feedback from users via e-mails. Furthermore, starting from this year, it is possible to report about bugs and request new features using github. As users’ feedback plays a crucial role in the development of OpenRouteService. It was decided to make the communication with users more clear and easier. In this release, we have added a feedback form, which can be found in bottom right corner of the map. This form allows sending us a message directly from the client.

In this release, we are introducing a new weighting method, called recommended. This option is different from fastest route one in a way the speed of passing a route segment and its desirability are considered in a route planning.

People often ask us why does travel time drastically differ from actual time they observe? Of course, there are many reasons for that, for example, traffic lights, speed of the vehicle, lay of the ground, etc. In OpenRouteService, every route profile uses a predefined default speed for car, bike or pedestrian routing. In order to give more freedom to users, we have provided a special field where one can specify the maximum speed value of traveling which more realistic under certain conditions.

There is another handy tool that has been introduced in the web client. This is a button (see image below) that reverses the way points of a trip. So, now you can easily compute the way back just with one click.

For more detailed list of changes, we recommend to look at a milestone report, which can be found on github.