Wheelchair support?

Hi,

we are evaluating (offline, on premise) routing for pedestrians. We are interrested in accessible routings as well, e.g. wheelchair support. AFAIK this is not yet possible with GraphHopper. Are there any plans to support this?

TIA
Kibu

Indeed it is not possible out of the box but it is possible with some modifications, see also this issue. There are even papers out there :wink: http://amslaurea.unibo.it/8245/1/cattalani_lisa_tesi.pdf

I’m also very interested in the topic!

I’d be very handy to have some navigation for hikes with the wheelchair - I would like to exclude certain types of roads/ways/paths/sideways depending on the road surface (like excluding gravel roads, cobble stones or small forest paths). Better yet would be the possibility to not strictly exclude but give them a very slow speed when calculating the navigation. I would also be able to see ascents/descents to avoid steep slopes. That info could also be included in the calculation of the navigation.

I did some very basic research and found some stuff, which could be useful as a starting point:

Obviosly road condition info can be submitted to OSM with this app:

So it seems that the needed data is available, at least in general.

How to map for the needs of people with disabilities: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/How_to_map_for_the_needs_of_people_with_disabilities

Wheelchair routing: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Wheelchair_routing

These keys which might be relevant: key:surface, key:smoothness, key:access und key:wheelchair

My question would be what would be the most effective way to contribute to graphhopper in order to get this routing capability? What needs to be done?

Thank you!

See this recently merged PR: https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper/pull/1726

Of course this is not yet finished nor fully tested in the wild. So any improvements are highly appreciated.

Oh, awesome!! Will that be incorporated into the reference site GraphHopper Maps so it can be tested?

For now we decided against it due to the heavy hardware requirements for every additional vehicle profile. But the next year will likely bring a powerful mechanism where this could be still done: https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper/issues/1776

Additionally it is very easy to set up your own graphhopper instance (incl. the UI): https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper/blob/master/docs/index.md#for-users

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Hi karussell,

Thanks for the tips!

I’m planning on getting a VPS to test my own graphhopper instance. However, I’m still not sure about the system requirements, though. It seems reasonable to me to have at least a map of Germany, better Europe. I read somewhere that 32GB RAM would be needed. But do I need so much RAM only one time for building the map or for every routing request?

Hey :slight_smile: I’m still pondering about the sizing of the VPS… would the following specs be good enough to try out GH for my project?

30GB RAM + 8x2.2GHz cores + 800 GB SSD

Thanks for your help!