GraphHopper Routing Engine 8.0 Released

We have released version 8.0 of GraphHopper, the flexible and fast open source routing engine for OpenStreetMap. Read more about it on GitHub, try GraphHopper Maps and read on to find out what’s new.

The following contributors worked on over 50 pull requests and many more smaller changes:

westnordost, christophlingg, easbar, karussell, michaz, ratrun, otbutz, lukasalexanderweber, boldtrn, OlafFlebbeBosch, bt90

Thanks a lot to all contributors!

GraphHopper can now consider speed limits of different countries even if no explicit “maxspeed” tag is provided in OpenStreetMap data. A special thanks to Tobias (westnordost) for his work on this topic! This will soon improve the time estimates on GraphHopper Maps in a few countries, where we currently deviate too much due to the global default of 100km/h for rural and 50km/h for urban speed.

For this purpose we also need to differentiate between rural and urban, where we introduced an “urban_density” calculation last year, as the urban boundaries are often only mapped for bigger cities. And for this calculation we now significantly reduced memory usage.

We have new translations for Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan for turn-by-turn instructions, thank you Muhammad and Kaisar. And a lot more translation work was done: in total we do now support 48 languages!

The bike profile now allows to use the reverse direction of one-ways at walking speed. This makes the bike route planning more natural especially in cities with many one-ways.

The global elevation data comes as raster data and this can lead to artifacts due to the “step-wise” changes. These artifacts can be reduced when we apply a special elevation smoothing, which was improved by Christoph.

The data from OpenStreetMap grows and grows as more roads in more areas are mapped and GraphHopper has to handle the volume also in the next years without reducing import speed or increasing memory usage too much. One of the important data structures to handle this was adapted to handle this growth.

The new routing engine release also includes an improved GraphHopper Maps: which you can add to the homescreen, has improved elevation details and improved mobile address input. Read more about the improvements like excluding areas or improved route hints in this blog post. Also have a look into the GraphHopper Maps Android app.

Visit the change log for potential breaking changes here.

Happy routing!