The City of Vancouver has a vision to make cycling safe, convenient, comfortable and fun for All Ages and Abilities (AAA), including families with children, seniors, and new riders. https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/design-guidelines-for-all-ages-and-abilities-cycling-routes.pdf
Most riders who strongly prefer AAA cycleways will immediately notice they can't trust their default map apps to suggest nice routes. In Vancouver, common apps offer distressing suggestions like taking Pender, Robson, even Granville; which makes getting around by bicycle impractical for many at first, until they eventually learn that there are longer but welcoming alternatives.
For example, consider searching for a route from Ramen Danbo at Robson to Jam Café at Beatty.
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Google Maps suggests going down at Robson - one of the busiest streets in Downtown Vancouver - until it finally takes protected bike paths at Hornby and at Smithe, only to move back to Robson! Why not stay on Smithy before turning left at Beatty? For some reason, Google Maps estimates that going straight at Smithe up until Beatty St would take 6 more minutes. Maybe they know that cyclists fearing for their lives will arrive faster? Sometimes Google Maps will simply suggest going down at Robson all the way towards Beatty St, so it seems some transient feature (like traffic) is factoring in the routing choices.
Apple maps suggests going down at Robson until it takes a protected bike path at Hornby; then taking the protected bike path at Dunsmuir. A decent balance of speed and comfort that an experienced rider would accept, certainly much better than what Google Maps suggests. But still, 4 blocks of Robson St traffic (about 750 m) is far from AAA, so many riders would be happier if they had a route that got off of Robson as soon as possible.
The custom profile for BRouter in this repository offers that route: merely 300m longer but immediately leaving Robson for Jervis and Haro which are residential streets plus Smithe, Horny and Dunsmuir protected paths. The goal of this project is researching a routing profile that is highly biased towards pleasant rides in the Vancouver Metro region.
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Until BRouter Web supports permalink/perennial profiles, we need to export the profile definition files for users to import on their browsers:
poetry run python vancycling_brouter_profile/transpiler.pyThis command updates the root vancycling.brf profile with the current router.
Tests always use live definitions, so there's no need to build beforehand.
poetry run python vancycling_brouter_profile/router.py