nah, didn't really expect it...

[cellio]

It was unlikely, but it would be cool if MapQuest (or some similar service) provided a path-finding option that minimizes the expenditure of kinetic energy. For, y'know, pedestrians who want to take hills into account. The only customization option I see is "avoid highways", which I was going to do anyway. :-)

Oh well. I will just have to rely on my innate knowledge of the topography involved.

Comments

I second that thought.

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

That would be too dang cool.

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

That would be very nifty when we have snow on the roads, too. I will go out of my way to take a flat road in the snow.

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

That would be handy for bicycles, too.

I also want the option of 'I'm willing to take slightly longer in exchange for directions that are easier to follow'.

[cellio]

When driving I am quite willing to trade ease for directness. In fact, I extend this to challenging traffic patterns as well; even when I know an area well, there are definitely times when I'll go out of my way for a traffic signal. (For example, I am unwilling to try to cross Shady at Darlington; the parked cars and the slope interfere with visibility, and it's not that far to go to either Forbes or Beacon and get a traffic light.)

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

In my neck of the woods, the big problem with using MapQuest for walking directions is the abundance of one-way streets. I can more than happily walk down a one-way street, but since MapQuest has to assume I'm driving, it sometimes routes me in the most illogical ways possible. I'd love for someone to develop a MapQuest-like system for pedestrians.

[cellio]

Yes, one-way streets would certainly be a factor. We don't have as many of those here. (Also, in this particular case, I know the area reasonably well; I'm just looking for the route that best accommodates laziness. :-) Well, maybe "laziness" isn't the right word; the destination I want to reach on Shabbat is 2.25 miles away, which adds up.)

[sekhmets-song.livejournal.com]

As long as we are making Mapquest wishes: I wish that it would say when it doesn't know where something is. I set out to a client's office, with Mapquest directions in hand, assuming that when it said "Reach destination" that I would actually be reaching the address I put into the damned thing. Oddly enough, it had me pass her office (buried ina big building with no obvious address on it) down another street to make a series of right hand turns until I "reached" my destination: a big empty field.
Thank you Mapquest. I truly hate you.

[cellio]

How irritating! I know that if you don't give a specific address (just a town) it'll take you to city hall, but I didn't realize that it would quietly guess in the face of an actual address.

city hall?

[laid.livejournal.com]

I thought it took you to the geographic center of town(which in some planned cities is something special, but more often not), just like it takes you to the center of the state if it can't find your city.

Re: city hall?

[cellio]

Hmm, you may be right. I had once read the "town hall" explanation somewhere I thought was authoritative, but some experimentation brings that into question.

[eub.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about how to do this, once. Minimize some weightable sum of horizontal distance and total vertical distance gained? But then I started trying the corner cases: scale a five-meter cliff, or walk fifteen meters up a thirty-degree grade? Hmm. Maybe some steepness term in there too. I like the "energy expended" idea, if it has a good model somehow.

Scanned topo maps are available online, for lots of the continental U.S. anyway. Seems somebody could parse them into nice heightfield information.

[cellio]

I initially thought about it in terms of veritcal distance but ran into the steepness problem, which is what led me to cast it in terms of energy. I don't know how easy that is to model, though. But maybe it could be parameterized -- minimize total vertical climb while specifying a threshold for steepness. Someone in a wheelchair, for instance, is going to have different constraints than a pedestrian does anyway, and a bicyclist can probably accommodate greater steepness without trouble. (It's all about channeling the energy from that running start. :-) )

[caryabend.livejournal.com]

Bah. The Earth is FLAT. It's just that so many people have warped minds.

:)

[cellio]

Heh. I'm not even taking the curvature of the earth into effect and asking if the map distances are "actually traversed" or "as the mole digs". Even a flat earth would have some topography like Pittsburgh's. :-)

[caryabend.livejournal.com]

Nope. It's entirely and completely planar. Barring excavations and other displacements, there are no "local disturbances," no curvature. Nothing. No "ups and downs." Nada. Totally flat.

Anything you perceive as up or down, or "topography" (whatever that means) is entirely in your head.

Lake and river beds and stuff is just an artifact of surface tension - and if somebody tried to spread you out on an infinite plain, you'd be tense too!

:)

Avoid highways . . .

[laid.livejournal.com]

Avoid highways avoids only limited access highways. One thing I did notice when I was planning the ride to my parents' house is that the "avoid highways" route is also pretty much the flattest route. Seems that someone took that into account when they built the US highway system back in the day. There are shorter routes from Scranton to Milford, but they have more hills.

Of course, rt 6 follows the Owego Turnpike alot of the way, and that's an old indian trail, but thats another story entirely.