Introducing our new routing profile

It's been a long time since we introduced our car routing service. Now, we are please to announce our new routing profile: walk. This profile is focused on pedestrian routing.

How does it work ?

The API is strickly the same as the car routing, you need to change the profile from car to walk. Juste like the car routing, this will route you from your starting point to your destination.

Exemple of request:

https://api.jawg.io/routing/route/v1/walk/13.388,52.517;13.397,52.529?access-token={your-jawg-access-token}

Differences between car and walk

Navigation time is always available and is calculated differently from the car routing. The car routing takes the types of roads to know the speed limit and also its location to suit the different countries' laws. For example in France our motorways limitation is 130km/h (~80mph), in Belgium it will be 120km/h (~75mph).
For pedestrian routing, the speed is about 5km/h (~3mph) and can vary depending on the type of ground surface (if it's sand, it will be slower for example). It is therefore simpler to calculate navigation times for pedestrian routing.

For navigation distances and possible journey, the car routing is lighter than pedestrian routing. The roads where cars can drive are much more limited than those for pedestrians. This increases the mass of data necessary to make a pedestrian routing.
For example there are streets where pedestrians and cars coexist and there will be only highways where pedestrians will be forbidden.
In addition there are many more ways that are reserved for pedestrians such as paths, footways etc.
This difference was felt when setting up the service, it requires much more resources than the car routing for its creation and its run.

Who can use this service ?

Everyone with an account to the jawg lab can access this service. The pedestrian routing will obviously use your routing requests.

Here is an example of a route between Gare du Nord and Gare Montparnasse in Paris. In blue we have the car route and in green the pedestrian route.

See you soon on the lab.