[HN Gopher] Eki Bright - The Case for DIY Routing
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Eki Bright - The Case for DIY Routing
Author : twocentstudios
Score : 29 points
Date : 2025-01-24 08:19 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twocentstudios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twocentstudios.com)
| nicoburns wrote:
| I can definitely see use cases where DIY routing would be better
| than traditional routing. But the thing that bothers me most
| about almost all mobile navigation apps is thw complete inability
| to multi task. Want to compare two routes? You can't without
| losing your state re-searching for the route each time. Same
| problem if you want to say compare reviews for a few different
| businesses in an area, or worse, different areas.
|
| You can sometimes work around this by accessing the web versions
| or using 2 different navigation apps, but it's dumb.
| 1propionyl wrote:
| Can also see myself using this. But my larger issue with most
| apps is that they won't let me do some combination of DIY and
| multi-modal.
|
| Yes, I want transit instructions. No, I am not walking to that
| station, I am on a bike. No, I am not going to take that
| particular bus because the road is full of potholes and my bike
| is heavy enough the rack on the front is questionable. Yes, I
| intend to skip one train because this station has cover I can
| wait under while the one I will transfer at doesn't and I want
| to wait under cover here and get there just in time rather than
| get there ASAP and wait without cover.
|
| There are just so many considerations to navigation when you're
| not in a car, mixing modes, and know the city and system pretty
| well already.
|
| I haven't seen any convincing attempt to tackle what an app for
| this sort of case might look like, but the linked article does
| seem to be getting towards it!
| Willamin wrote:
| Totally agreed! It's a problem I'd love to see solved well.
| I've wanted a route planning / mapping app that can achieve
| advanced features for a few years now. I'd love to build it
| myself but honestly, I'd much more excited that it could
| exist rather than it existing under my control and for my
| profit.
|
| * Multi-modal planning: where walking, transit, biking, and
| driving can be independently selected for each leg of the
| journey (in a multi-stop trip)
|
| * Travel breaks with duration: for a multi-stop trip, allow
| the inclusion of estimated stop time (e.g. I plan to stop for
| a meal at a particular restaurant on my upcoming road trip
| and I intend for that stop to take 1.5 hours). That stop time
| would then affect the ETA for all stops along the way and may
| even impact which public transit options are available at
| later stops.
|
| * Multi-day journeys: for more specifically planning road
| trips or vacations.
|
| * Constraints on the journey: the most familiar of these
| (which is already somewhat implemented in the popular maps
| apps) is whether a business will be closed when you arrive.
| Others could involve weather predictions (on a multi-day,
| multi-stop trip I only want to go to the beach on a day it's
| not raining), daylight hours (I don't want to go to the park
| after dark), etc. I would expect this feature to let users
| provide their constraints and the planned route would warn
| users if their constraints aren't met.
|
| * As mentioned in another comment, route comparisons: for
| single-stop or multi-stop trips, it should be incredibly
| simple to compare two or more routes. This should be possible
| prior to travel _and_ while en route. CityMapper provides
| some amount of this feature: while on a route, you can return
| to the form where you input your origin and destination and
| can get an idea of comparisons.
|
| * Another comment (and the article) mentioned exploration
| while en route: it should be trivial to explore the map in a
| way that's completely unrelated to one's current trip.
| Similarly, it should be easier to search for locations that
| are nearby your route (that is, wouldn't take more than X
| amount of time out of your way).
|
| An obvious stretch goal after having these features would be
| to allow for trip optimization given a number of modes of
| travel, destinations, timing constraints, ordering
| constraints (want to pick up food before I go to the park for
| a picnic, so restaurant must come before picnic), and even
| proposed start and finish times for a trip. This of course
| falls into the realm of the traveling salesman problem, but
| if I'm able to reasonable build a few proposals for routes
| manually (by setting arrival / departure times and choosing
| transport modes in my maps app) one stop at a time, an app
| could certainly check a few permutations.
| jefurii wrote:
| I really like the DIY routing concept! It certainly would have
| helped me during my most recent trip to Japan.
|
| Google was great this time around but it just didn't understand
| that people might want to stop and look at stuff while walking
| between trains, and I found myself having to fiddle with it and
| sometimes restart whole trips when being able to pause and
| restart them would have worked (or maybe I just don't know how to
| do that?).
|
| DIY routing sounds closer to having an intelligent version of
| those books of timetables I used to carry around.
| graypegg wrote:
| I've had this exact same issue a lot as well! I tend to walk way
| faster than google assumes I should.
|
| Maybe one suggestion I could think of, would be a risk score.
| Given a set of segments, which transfers are the most "risky"?
| (From those departures, arrivals and transfer estimates, how bad
| would the impact be going forward from missing a transfer?)
|
| The main thing I get from Google Map's estimates is an indication
| that something has changed. If google gives me a route I wouldn't
| expect, it's normally because some trains/busses have been
| removed from the schedule today/running slow. Without forcing a
| route on you, it would be nice to have it hint at the fact that
| I'll be catching the last train that hour, thus making segments
| before it "riskier", scaled by how often they arrive + how long
| my transfer time is + how out of sync they are from the next
| segment's departures.
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