EO Traveller routing

HI Warren
I can explain this further for you too...
The building of navigation in the app is done in segments - ie. Place to Place. The app uses an internet lookup in the MapBox system (not our software but an online tool universally used by many auto routing systems). It doesn't know a thing about our maps but has a database of road data it uses to calculate your route to navigate between the 2 selected Places.

Most of the time the data it extracts is spot on - even in outback areas, however in outback areas it can also be a bit patchy for various reasons that are often hard to determine except by trial and error. We aren't 100% sure if the reason is that MapBox has to restrict the system from auto routing every road as "driveable" due to liability issues (eg. areas that are prone to flooding) or if their data just actually doesn't have complete data for areas.

What we do know is how the auto router works. It has to find road "attribution" data in its database for every segment between every junction of a road/track for the whole length of segment you are asking it to calculate. Problems occur when one tiny bit of road attribution is missing - hence a whole segment can be rejected when in fact the issue is only due to a much smaller area of road info missing. So sometimes its a matter of high zoom investigation to locate the problem spot and just insert an extra Place to break that segment into two either side of the junction or river crossing and then you'll find that you'll get "driving" calculations for either side of the problem bit - and therefore shorten the section you need to use other modes for. Sometimes even Cycling wont work and you'll need to use "straight" so obviously you want to try to keep that segment as short as possible. When I was making a Trek Note last year, I found a problem section was just 30m long across a dry creek bed for which no other mode would work except "straight" but that's fine!

In fact, I think when you've requested "Driving" it has used "Straight" to fudge when it was within tolerance of 30m of inaccuracy via Driving for a problem spot. Not sure - but good that you are experimenting. There is always a way.

I have some ideas for further improvement of the system to add in future updates too.

Just wandering if this problem had been addressed in the latest update or do we have to wait until the next update. There are plenty of marked tracks that can't be made into treks no matter what modes I set it to. (walk, cycle etc. Very frustrating.