Because RouteXL accepts lat/long lists I chose it to route my road sign positions.
I have 93 locations plotted for placing road signs reminding voters that town meeting election day is March 3.
These locations are all at key intersections in our town.
Sometimes the lat/long resolves to an address, but in about 20% of the cases it does not (for example, the sand pile at the turnaround on Rt 4 near the green for the 4th hole on the golf course , which is nowhere near any structure with an address, but it is only about 15 feet off the roadway).
Because of these gaps the generated routing was useful in terms of helping me see which routing was most efficient, but wasn’t useful as a tool while we were driving the route. We had to fall back to using the google map I originally made. Is there some way of telling RouteXL to post all points whether they can be routed or not?
Thanks for the suggestion. Let’s check if I understand it correctly.
Our route planner always sorts the locations in order. Even if there’s no routing for one or more points possible. In that case we have fallback procedures to estimate the travel time (e.g. as the crows fly). This is all done in the background.
When we display the multi stop route on the map of our website, we ask Google Maps for the driving instructions of each track between two points. Therefore I wonder why your original Google map is different from ours.
Could it be that you selected the closest stop on the roadway to reach each location on Google map? If so, is that what our route planner should do: find the closest position on a road nearby and use that for the routing optimization?
I am surprised that the locations are repositioned by the route planner. I am not aware of any function in our software that would do such a thing. The routing in the background does snap points to roads but we do not take that as destination.
We’d like to investigate this in depth. Could you send us the points (lat/lng) that you need to route en let us know which of the downloads you did use for this? We’ll need to replicate the problem on our system and solve it from there.
OK, I had a chance to examine the data from your downloads and now I see that the messages I was getting about points that were not street addresses did not always mean the point was unmapped.
A careful look at the data shows me that you take the provided lat long and find the nearest address or segment midpoint and reposition it. This is what you need to do to sort the points into routes. However, it means that where I position a roadsign exactly at an intersection two meters before a stop sign, RouteXL might reposition it near the driveway of the house on the corner, or on the structure itself.
What I would like to see would be an option to preserve the exact pin position after the routing was done. In other words you would revert the pins to the provided lat long but keep the ordering. For points you can’t map, allow the user to interpolate into the routing and reorder with that point fixed at the number selected by the user.
I’ve prepared a Google map illustrating the issue: