as someone who lives in the southern part of Germany, I often have the challenge that planned round trips lead into our neighbourhood countries like Austria or Czech Republik. Because of the Corona pandemic and related quarantine regulations, touristic visits to other countries make no sense momentarily. It would be nice to have a function like “avoid border crossing”.
Do you have something like this already in mind?
GraphHopper (offline) routing had border limits due to its country sized graphs.
(it was considered a disadvantage vs online routing and offline BRouter)
Currently it’s not planned to avoid border crossings. I absolutely understand that in the current situation it’s undesired to cross the border. I also understand that not everyone lives in the EU where crossing the border is usually extremely easy. Crossing some border can take hours, so it’s not really nice.
So having the option to optionally avoid border crossings could make sense. Implementing this properly is not easy though, so when considering the benefits of this feature vs. overhead I am not sure that this makes sense to implement. Regarding the current situation, this is only temporary (hopefully ) so creating something rather complicated that might not be needed once it’s implemented is not especially tempting.
I actually disagree with that, especially since - as you mentioned yourself - border crossings outside europe are somthing to avoid on a quick day trip, since they cost a lot of time. That’s probably also the reason services like google had this feature even before the pandemic.
I think it would be cool if you can keep in on the “ideas” or “to do” list, even though it might of course be lower down in the priority. Maybe we could move this topic to the suggestions category to keep track of it until then
I think such a function is completely unnecessary. The borders are drawn in all maps. It can’t be too much effort to manually set a few shaping points if you don’t want to cross the border.
Setting shaping points work well to avoid border crossings in the planning state. But if you left your planned route and the route is recalculated, it could result in border crossing again.