Calculate the shortest non-car route from A to B with a global altitude penalty

[fluorescein]

Hi,

this is my second posted question here in this forum. I've tried the Locus free app and was so happy with this android app, I bought Locus Pro and I have to mention: It's absolutely worth to buy it, because you can review the recorded tracks with different diagrams, that's really great!

Before I've used a computer and created my first route with: http://geo.ebp.ch/gelaendeprofil/, converted it to GPX format with http://www.gpsies.com/convert.do and sent it to my smartphone and opened it with the Locus app. With this procedure I was able to find a way to manually minimise the total meters I have to ride uphill.

I live in Switzerland and I'm looking for tours of approximately 30 km which are useful for mountainbikers and walkers: I'm a freestyle/downhill unicyclist but I want to avoid long sections of several hundreds of meters for cars which don't have sidewalks for pedestrians. If I'm looking for new routes I always combine routes for walkers, in-line skaters and wheelchair-accessible routes. So short staircases are no big problem for me.

Without using a computer I'd like to use Locus Pro or a website tool to create a route from point A to point B with an uphill meter altitude penalty of let's say 200 meters. The app or website should give me the shortest available track (optimized for pedestrians) with these 200 m altitude restrictions and should be importable in the Locus app.

Do you know a solution?

[jusc]

 Hard to say. You can try to create your own BRouter profile. http://brouter.de/brouter/costfunctions.html. You have to install at first BRouter app and to download the neccessary routing files.
But I never tried it. And as I understand with BRouter you don't have the altitude data.
So I think with Locus (and p. e. BRouter as routing app) it is not possible.

[tommi]

What do you mean with "with Brouter you don't have the altitude data"?
The track in Locus allows to download the altitude data and then you can view it in the diagram.

[fluorescein]

The personal user profile is much less important than the number of total meters riding uphills. It would be nice if a certain webpage or android app has such a cut-off limit to calculate the shortest route for a upper limit of altitude meters (it should either have a lower boundary or a boundary for the maximal distance that the distance is not going to be 10x longer than the airline to avoid non-sense routes with almost no altitude meters).

[Andrew Heard]

And as I understand with BRouter you don't have the altitude data.

BRouter definitely has altitude data.

Without using a computer I'd like to use Locus Pro or a website tool to create a route from point A to point B with an uphill meter altitude penalty of let's say 200 meters. The app or website should give me the shortest available track (optimized for pedestrians) with these 200 m altitude restrictions and should be importable in the Locus app.

Do you know a solution?

You can upload your own custom profile for routing experiments in http://brouter.de/brouter-web/. The Google group brouter forum is probably a better place to ask this question. Those guys are really great with answers.

[jusc]

What do you mean with "with Brouter you don't have the altitude data"?
The track in Locus allows to download the altitude data and then you can view it in the diagram.

Are the altitude data merged with pure OSM data inside of the rd5 files? So that BRouter can calculate the used altitude?

[tommi]

What do you mean with "with Brouter you don't have the altitude data"?
The track in Locus allows to download the altitude data and then you can view it in the diagram.

Are the altitude data merged with pure OSM data inside of the rd5 files? So that BRouter can calculate the used altitude?

I think so. How should penalty calculation work? What I don't know is if brouter adds the altitude info to the track points. But for me this is not so important as Locus can do it

[jusc]

@Andrew, Tommi,

you are right, at least with already dowloaded srtm data I get a brouter0.gpx with statistics about altitude.
Thanks for this hint.

[fluorescein]

@tommi:

I think so. How should penalty calculation work?

First I was thinking in this way:
A) If I set x = 100 m and y=10 m the route from point A to point B should be calculated so there is no local route section which has more than 10 m to ride uphill for a distance of 100 m, the total distance might be 30 km.
B) If I set x = 200 m and y=10 m the route from point A to point B should be calculated so there is no local route section which has more than 10 m to ride uphill for a distance of 200 m, the total distance might be 35 km.

I think this calculation can be implemented in Locus by using local parameters:

Let's consider a track, automatically splitted into 100 sections A=A0 to B=A100: If section A3 to A4 (x meter) has a total number of uphill meters y the sub-route-section from A3 to A4 should be recalculated with parameter z which describes the additional % of longer distance for this section. The parameters x, y and z should be set in the app by the user. As a result the app could propose the total number of altitude meters the rider has to go uphill plus the total distance from A to B.

---

I would really appreciate if this total altitude uphill meters optimization can be done directly in Locus. I was searching in the internet for a similar tool which does not quite do what I want (with parameters x,y,z and numbers of the total distance and uphill meters as output) but there are some suggestions here:

http://bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/30583/app-to-find-the-shortest-route-with-the-least-amount-of-climbs/30827#30827

http://bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/18951/topography-aware-route-planning

[fluorescein]

BRouter gave me a very nice route, with its profile safety.

BRouter avoides differences in altitudes less than 10 m
(E.g. if a hypothetic route was a road with many small up/down jumps  +/-5 m, filtered ascend would be 0 m.)

When I import the created gpx file with Locus pro should I click "Fill altitude"?

[tommi]

@tommi:

I think so. How should penalty calculation work?

First I was thinking in this way:
A) If I set x = 100 m and y=10 m the route from point A to point B should be calculated so there is no local route section which has more than 10 m to ride uphill for a distance of 100 m, the total distance might be 30 km.
B) If I set x = 200 m and y=10 m the route from point A to point B should be calculated so there is no local route section which has more than 10 m to ride uphill for a distance of 200 m, the total distance might be 35 km.

I think this calculation can be implemented in Locus by using local parameters:

Let's consider a track, automatically splitted into 100 sections A=A0 to B=A100: If section A3 to A4 (x meter) has a total number of uphill meters y the sub-route-section from A3 to A4 should be recalculated with parameter z which describes the additional % of longer distance for this section. The parameters x, y and z should be set in the app by the user. As a result the app could propose the total number of altitude meters the rider has to go uphill plus the total distance from A to B.

---

I would really appreciate if this total altitude uphill meters optimization can be done directly in Locus. I was searching in the internet for a similar tool which does not quite do what I want (with parameters x,y,z and numbers of the total distance and uphill meters as output) but there are some suggestions here:

http://bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/30583/app-to-find-the-shortest-route-with-the-least-amount-of-climbs/30827#30827

http://bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/18951/topography-aware-route-planning

Sorry, this was a rhetorical question to explain that brouter at least internally uses altitude data to calculate the penalty for up and down.