Why are many marked hiking trails avoided in pedestrian route calculations?

openrouteservice directions
1

Hello,

When I use ORS to calculate hiking (or walking) routes, I notice that many local paths are avoided. This includes marked hiking trails that should normally be routable. I’ve checked the OSM data for these paths, and there don’t seem to be any obvious access restrictions (no private=yes, no access=no, etc.).
In addition, I can see sac_scale=strolling on several of these paths, so according to my understanding, that should not exclude them.

For example, most of the ways in these relations are affected:

Here is an example where several of these paths are skipped by the routing engine.

I’d like to understand why the routing engine avoids so many of these paths, even though they seem valid (to me) in OSM.

Thank you for your help!

2

Hey,

these are marked as sac_scale=strolling, a rather new addition to the OSM, and not a SAC scale that is used outside of OSM.

Compared to sac_scale=hiking, it is also not very commonly used, see this comparison on taginfo.

Therefore, no one has thought about adding it to openrouteservice, and consequently, the ors considers these ways as non-applicable for foot-* profiles.

The fix is comparatively easy though:

It should be part of the next release :slight_smile:

Best regards

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3

Thank you very much! I can’t wait for the fix to take effect. It’ll save me from having to use so many direct points as a workaround :squinting_face_with_tongue:.

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