New OpenRouteService now with live traffic data, improved route profiles, new Leaflet client and more!

Today we want to introduce several new features in OpenRouteService:

OpenRouteService.org now offers live traffic information in Germany provided by the The Federal Highway Research Institute (BASt). Every 5 minutes the traffic information is updated and refreshed on the map. Every segment containing a traffic information is colored and has clickable icons with more information. In case your route is affected by such traffic events then the individual traffic messages will be shown in your route instructions list.

The selection of different ORS route profiles have been improved with further options: e.g. you will now be able to avoid tunnels when travelling by car and heavy vehicles; mountain bikers now can choose to avoid paved roads and pedestrians can avoid steps.

In order to gain a significant boost in speed and responsiveness for mobile & Web devices we ported the ORS frontend from OpenLayers to Leaflet 1.0. Thereby we not only revamped the entire stylesheet for our map design, but also added several new features, such as elevation profiles for the bicyclists and the overpassAPI to show restrictions within the ORS heavy vehices profile.

Besides these features, we are introducing a further routing profile into main version of ORS: the wheelchair profile. Since we are still working on this profile and since the OSM is still missing some of the most important data for this profile (sidewalks, incline, dropped kerbs), we mark this profile as being in beta status. In the OSM Wiki, we will soon publish all relevant tags that are already evaluated by this profile. We recommend to have a look on the OSM QA editor that shows the availability of some of the most important tags for this profile. However, on selected routes you can already see the difference between pedestrian and wheelchair profile – see these examples for route and accessibility zones:

Please note that the new ORS client is only tested on Firefox, Chrome and Safari. A more detailed list of changes can be found on github.
OpenRouteService.org currently offers routing for Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and Oceania with up2date OpenStreetMap data. For the next two days only Germany is supported, but the original continents will be covered again around Christmas time. Stay tuned for further enhancements.