OpenRouteService (ORS) was the first routing service based on OpenStreetMap in early 2008 that covered whole countries. ORS also introduced international pedestrian and bicycle routing, even before e.g. Google was offering this.
Since 2008 OpenRouteService has been constantly available online and over the years it evolved from covering individual states in the beginning, to the whole of Europe, to several continents – basically the whole globe without North and South America.
Because of limitations of available computing resources we at GIScience Heidelberg were only very recently able to add full global coverage to OpenRouteService. But now OpenRouteService covers also the Americas for all the main routing profiles, e.g. for car, pedestrian, heavy vehicles, bikes – the latter with several options from MTB, road bike to safest bike route etc. You may check the many options and ways to configure ORS (covering dozens of combinations of routing options, languages and further features).
Over the years ORS has been completely redeveloped both on the server as well on the client side. For example it offers now a reactive design for mobile smartphone users and many other features.
We appreciate suggestions from the community to openrouteservice@geog.uni-heidelberg.de
Also the Isochrones calculated through the Accessibility Analysis are now available worldwide for the different transportation modes.
Currently only the wheelchair option is not yet available for the Americas, but ORS is providing wheelchair routing for the rest of the world. Of course the relevant specific information for supporting this routing profile needs to be available in OpenStreetMap and there is still a lot to be mapped anywhere with respect to this.
We do thank the Klaus Tschira Stiftung Heidelberg for their support to establish the “Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology” (HeiGIT), which provides further resources for extending OpenRouteService in a more sustainable way.