Towards Realistic Pedestrian Route Planning

Pedestrian routing has its specific set of challenges, which are often neglected by state-of-the-art route planners. For instance, the lack of detailed sidewalk data and the inability to traverse plazas and parks in a natural way often leads to unappealing and suboptimal routes. In this work, we first propose to augment the network by generating sidewalks based on the street geometry and adding edges for routing over plazas and squares. Using this and further information, our query algorithm seamlessly handles node-to-node queries and queries whose origin or destination is an arbitrary location on a plaza or inside a park. Our experiments show that we are able to compute appealing pedestrian routes at negligible overhead over standard routing algorithms