Yet another Hacker News

Find the flattest route between any two points in SF

54 points ishan0102 1 hour ago 12 comments

pokpokpok 1 hour ago | parent

The wiggle!

(in honor of my old commute, which I miss)

https://flattensf.com/#t~-122.40850~37.77493~-122.50940~37.7...

tedd4u 1 hour ago | parent

Cool! Any way to toggle on street names on the map?

mvkel 58 minutes ago | parent

Absolutely love the live profile updating when you swipe from flatter to shorter.

Terr_ 56 minutes ago | parent

> The slider runs along the whole trade-off between distance and climbing [...] Climbing is cumulative gain

Another mechanism might be a kind of user-defined cost-curve, where a gradual climb to 10 might be preferred over a steep climb to 8, etc.

jeffbee 40 minutes ago | parent

You want OpenTripPlanner. Their triangle lets the user trade distance, climbing, and safe facilities.

https://github.com/opentripplanner/OpenTripPlanner

https://github.com/opentripplanner/OpenTripPlanner/blob/dev-...

danserfaty 52 minutes ago | parent

It's not accurate. I mapped it from my house on Cabrillo St in the outer Richmond to 4th avenue and it says I need to climb 25th avenue then walk Geary instead of correctly telling me to use 23rd avenue that is completely flat.

jeffbee 22 minutes ago | parent

I think this comes down to the DEM they are using. I think it would have come out better if they had used USGS 3DEP DTM at 25cm.

Edited: which apparently is hosted for free on AWS S3.

almstimplmntd 16 minutes ago | parent

ah, I think this is related to SF's "Slow Streets" program and a genuine bug in the parser.

Cabrillo is a Slow Street, and the parser read its "destination-only" tag as closed to pedestrians, so the tool couldn't see the street at all (and started you a block over?). fixed and deployed; your trip should now go Cabrillo → 23rd → Geary.

qurren 43 minutes ago | parent

Doesn't Google Maps in bicycle mode already do this?

Arainach 14 minutes ago | parent

There are many constraints to satisfy, and avoiding hills is but one of them.

Most of us would take a hill with a protected bike lane over a flat 45mph.

fnord77 21 minutes ago | parent

Try downtown to somewhere in Bernal, say Progressive Grounds coffee house.

The flattest route is only 0.2 miles longer than the shortest, but goes from 200ft of climbing to 500ft of climbing, 12% max grade to 22% max grade.

Apple maps picks the shortest every fucking time.

cheeaun 4 minutes ago | parent

Cool, I used to build this https://github.com/cheeaun/steepless (2014)