Scientific sources for foot-walking and other profiles

openrouteservice
1

Hi,

I would like to know how foot-walking and all the other profiles have been defined. Are there any reference to understand why this average speed characteristics were chosen ecc.

All the best

2

Hi @mattiascalas,

check out the encoders for this:
https://github.com/GIScience/openrouteservice/blob/master/openrouteservice/src/main/java/org/heigit/ors/routing/graphhopper/extensions/flagencoders/FootFlagEncoder.java#L45-L48

Also see:

As for why, that’s a mixture of trial and error for reasonable results, common sense and actual trial runs. But nothing documented.
As you could factor in a lot of stuff here (height, gender, age… just the first page i found :grimacing: ) i think the 5 km/h is a fitting general estimate.

Best regards

3

Thank you very much. I’m using this amazing tool for my PhD thesis so I also would like to ask if there are some scientific publications that can be cited to explain both the tool itself both its scientific background.

Thanks a lot!

4

Hi Mattias, there are many scientific studies about the measured walking speeds of people, especially elderly people and the context of how to provide enough time to cross roads at traffic signals.

I’m not an expert in that subset of transportation engineering, but I’m aware that it’s an important part of study and affects how cities design their traffic signals.

I used the keywords “walking speed traffic signal” on Google Scholar and I see a bunch of studies co-sponsored by the U.S. Transportation Research Board.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C14&q=walking+speed+traffic+signal&btnG=

5

Regarding the tool:
there are no up to date publications that describe ors in the state it is today.
There are some publications that do a general overview from 2007 and 2008:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alexander-Zipf/publication/228679185_A_Web_Accessibility_Analysis_Service_based_on_the_OpenLS_Route_Service/links/02e7e517aba95b38d6000000/A-Web-Accessibility-Analysis-Service-based-on-the-OpenLS-Route-Service.pdf
or

Otherwise you could just cite our website:
https://openrouteservice.org/

Or directly the repository:

Best regards