Ubiquitous mobile devices, such as smartphones, led to an increased popularity of pedestrian related routing applications over the past few years. Since pedestrians typically aim to minimize their walking distance, especially within non-recreational and multi-modal trips, pedestrian routing systems will only then be fully utilized if they are able to find the correct shortest path 5 and thus help to avoid unnecessary detours. GPS-based car navigation systems have become standard already several years ago, which has lead to the availability of accurate street network data for car-based routing applications. However, pedestrian routing applications should consider pedestrian related network segments besides those utilized by motorized traffic, including footpaths, or pedestrian bridges. This paper performs a shortest path analysis of pedestrian routes 10 for cities in Germany and the US. More specifically, we compare for a set of 1000 randomly generated origin-destination pairs the lengths of pedestrian routes that are computed based on different freely available network sources, such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) and TIGER/Line data, and proprietary datasets, such as TomTom, NAVTEQ, and ATKIS. The results show that freely available data sources such as OpenStreetMap provide a relatively comprehensive option for 15 cities where commercial pedestrian data sets are not yet available.
Zielstra and Hochmair REF investigated different proprietary and collaborative geo-datasets for cities in Germany and the US regarding the length of the shortest pedestrian routes.
Using Free and Proprietary Data to Compare Shortest-Path Lengths for Effective Pedestrian Routing in Street Networks
Transportation Research Record
Engineering