Multimodal routes use excessive walking

[dhogan-io]

• Device name: Pixel
• Android Version: 7.1.2
• App build number: 14.0
• What did you expect to happen?
  When routing from point A to point B, Eraser should have you wait at a bus stop rather than walk parallel to the bus route.
• What happened instead?
  Eraser suggests that you walk along the bus line to the most distant stop such that you will not miss the bus.

Routing along Camino Real in Palo Alto/Mountain View/Sunnyvale, CA easily triggers the bug since VTA bus 22 runs along the road.

Adding appropriate costing seems to fix the issue. "costing_options":{"transit":{"use_bus":"1.0","use_rail":"1.0","use_transfers":"0.3"}} works well based on a small amount of testing.

[msmollin]

Thanks for the feedback! I agree that does seem excessive.

My concern about costing options like that is in many cases there could be a good reason our backend is recommending that; either the bus might not be stopping there or the longer route is actually easier to get to given elevation and road systems. Making the suggested change would affect those cases as well. However I could be wrong on that!

To test this it would be useful to have either starting and ending lat/longs or a GPX trace of the route. Can you possibly provide either of those?

@dnesbitt61 is there any downsides to altering the costing model like suggested above?

[dhogan-io]

Here's an example:

https://valhalla.mapzen.com/route?json={"locations":[{"lat":37.42013,"lon":-122.13588},{"lat":37.44473,"lon":-122.16245}],"costing":"multimodal","date_time":{"type":1,"value":"2017-07-07T19:25"}}
Summary: walk 1.8 km, take VTA bus 22 for one stop, walk ~1 km.
Total time: 44 min (19:25-20:09)

https://valhalla.mapzen.com/route?json={"locations":[{"lat":37.42013,"lon":-122.13588},{"lat":37.44473,"lon":-122.16245}],"costing":"multimodal","date_time":{"type":1,"value":"2017-07-07T19:25"},"costing_options":{"transit":{"use_bus":"1.0","use_rail":"1.0","use_transfers":"0.3"}}}
Summary: walk 0.3 km, take VTA bus 22 for nine stops, walk 0.3 km.
Total time: 21 min (19:25-19:41)

[msmollin]

Great thanks for that. I had a discussion with our routing team and they agree in this case they can probably tweak the formula on the back-end a little bit more to help out with that problem. Feel free to subscribe to valhalla/valhalla#821 to watch and see when it gets merged in.

In the mean time in EM we could add some additional settings specific for multimodal routes. The routing team did agree with my initial assessment that altering the weights universally will have impact worldwide that may not be conducive for other cities. Maybe we could add a couple check boxes to indicate preference from the end user to further modify the route? This would be similar to "Prefer local roads over highways" except more like "Prefer buses and trains over walking".

@sarahlensing any additional thoughts on that?

[sarahsnow1]

...just a +1 to adding route options in EM. I've wanted to be able to configure toll and ferry options, this is a good opportunity to consider adding them in as well.