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There was an issue during the route calculation or navigation, what can I do about it?

This page is dedicated to routing issues, where Kurviger won't route along a certain road even though it should be possible to route along this road, Kurviger uses a road that is actually not accessible, or when there were issues with the turn instructions.

Kurviger is based on OpenStreetMap (OSM). OSM is a project where volunteers help to create a model of the world. This means, somebody has to enter the data into OSM to make it available to the public. If the world changes, someone has to update the data in OSM. Depending on where you are living, chances might be good, that you come across a road that is not correctly specified in OSM (we call this not correctly tagged). Kurviger respects the restrictions that are tagged in OSM and the most common tags, if there are no restrictions, there is no way for us to know if a certain road might not be accessible.

You should be aware that the quality of the road data varies by area. The data in Central and Western Europe is usually very good and routes should only contain minor issues. In Eastern Europe, North America, Australia, Russia, and Japan, the data should be alright, but there might be some issues. A typical example might be that the route follows a dirt road, even though you specified “avoid unpaved roads”, this is because the road is not marked as such. In Asia, South America, Middle East, and Africa the data might contain bigger issues. For these regions roads or important road data might be missing. Please be aware that the routes calculated by Kurviger are only meant for planning purposes, routes might not be accessible or safe.

These cases could be, that Kurviger uses a road that is not accessible. Or maybe Kurviger won't use a Route, even though you know that the road is accessible. No matter how many waypoints you place along the road, Kurviger simply won't take the road. Maybe the turn instructions are incorrect, like a missing street name or maybe no turn instruction was given at all.

Usually, if Kurviger is behaving very weird, this is because there is an issue in the OSM data, obviously this is not always the case, but usually :). If you see such an issue, while planning a route, please help to improve the OSM data. OSM is used by millions of people, so you are not only supporting Kurviger but a lot of different projects. You can always let us know in our forum and we will help you finding the reason for the incorrect results and can report a note in OSM.

If you are wondering, why you are the first one to stumble over this issue, even though there are millions of users, this could be due to different reasons. First of all, the data is changing all the time, maybe somebody made a change that was not correct. Secondly, Kurviger prefers small roads, most routing software takes you along the highway or is only considering bike or foot routing, where access restrictions are different to motorcycles. Or maybe multiple users are suffering from this issue, but don't know how to solve the issue. We are here to help you!

Do you feel keen about helping the community? Great! There are a lot of tutorials out there to help you getting started. I like this tutorial. Thanks in advance for supporting the community and open data!

There can be multiple reasons for that. Basically there are two types of access restrictions, permanent restrictions and temporary or conditional restrictions. When asking a machine to calculate a route, permanent restrictions are easy, it's never allowed to use the road, so Kurviger won't create a route on this road. Temporary or conditional restrictions are a lot more complicated. For example a road is closed on Sundays, Kurviger cannot know if you would like to use this road on a Sunday or not. The Kurviger website allows you to show these potentially closed roads as an overlay, so you can include these in your planning.

Especially for smaller roads, there might be a missing access restriction in OSM. You should check that the access tag is set correctly. Access restrictions can be set to ways and nodes. Generally we recommend to tag the ways. Ways also include ferries, so if a ferry is not transporting motorcycles, this can be tagged for the way of the ferry.

If a road is closed for motorcycles you would tag it motorcycle=no. If no motor vehicles are allowed on the road you would tag it motor_vehicle=no. There are many different options, most are described in the OSM wiki.

Construction Sites

Construction sites are not always tagged in OSM. If the construction site is only a short-term construction site (less than 6 months), the general opinion is that it's more suitable to tag it as temporary access restriction (see below). If the construction takes longer than 6 months, it could be tagged as permanent access restriction. See the OSM wiki for more details.

These can include road closures on the weekend, in the winter, at night, or for a certain period of time. This also includes construction sites shorter than 6 months. Tagging conditional access restrictions, might look a bit complicated at first, but don't worry, it's not that complicated, we will show you a couple of the common examples and should be easy to extend it for your specific case.

Road that is closed for motorcycles on the weekend: motorcycle:conditional=no @ (Sa,Su,PH) Road that is closed for some time, like a construction site: motor_vehicle:conditional=no @ (2018 May 22-2018 Oct 7) Road that is closed every year, for example in winter: The fast and generic option is to use access:conditional=no @ winter Some roads usually have close from a certain month to another month, so you could use access:conditional=no @ (Nov-Mar) for roads that are usually close from November to March.

There are many more examples in the OSM wiki. If you are uncertain, let us know in our forum, we are happy to assist you.

If you face an issue here. You might want to check your advanced routing options first. If you ticked “avoid ferries”, “avoid motorways”, or “avoid toll roads”, these avoidances are quite strong and Kurviger will make big detours to avoid them.

Explicitly tagging allowance for motorcycles on ferries is often not done in OSM, therefore some ferries are not used. There are issues with streets that are forbidden for motorcyclists for some conditions. These roads are often tagged incorrect and therefore these roads produce errors.

Unfortunately, I cannot check and correct every road, so Kurviger and OSM is always happy if the community improves the data. If you find a road or ferry that is not routed correctly in Kurviger you can just go to OpenStreetMap and correct it. Only change values if you know the street and that the given tags are wrong! Kurviger uses a ferry if the tags are either motorcycle=yes or motor_vehicle=yes. If you want you can also enter the duration. The duration makes it more likely to that the ferry is actually used.

Kurviger can access a barrier, like a gate or a lift_gate if you add access=yes, if the access tag is missing, Kurviger will not route through this gate. Kurviger considers access, motorcycle, motor_vehicle, and vehicle. So if a barrier is only accessible for vehicles, but maybe not for pedestrians, you should set vehicle=yes on the barrier and not the more generic access=yes. Try to be specific, but you don't need to get into too much detail.

To easily find these barriers you can use this overpass query.

Fords are tricky, as they are often seasonal or more challenging after rain. Kurviger will route through fords, but if they are marked as impassable or deep, we will not allow routing over them. If you are routed through a deep ford, consider updating the OSM data or let us know.

Sometimes it can happen that turn restrictions are entered incorrectly. Kurviger supports basic turn restrictions without via nodes (see the OSM wiki for more information). It is hard to spot these issues on OpenStreetMap, therefore we recommend to use this website that makes it easy to find turn restrictions and automatically marks them as potentially erroneous if something seems wrong.

We try to calculate a realistic ETA based on the available road data. In general our ETAs should be good enough for a rough orientation. However, we have seen issues with the ETA if the road data is insufficient. We rely on max speed tags and other road information being present to estimate a realistic ETA. Another relevant tag for ETA calculation is the surface (see the section about unpaved). If there is not enough data, we try to estimate a realistic ETA, which might not always be possible. If you have seen cases where the ETAs are completely off, please feel free to contact us or to improve the OSM data. Please also be aware that travel times depend on the weather. A wet and muddy dirt road might slow you down considerably or might even force you to take an alternative route.

We read surface information from OSM, with some exceptions, we assume that roads are paved, unless otherwise marked. This means, if you avoided unpaved roads, but yet have been routed over an unpaved road, this road is probably not marked as unpaved.

This could be fixed by adding the surface attribute to the road. Often you would set surface=unpaved or surface=gravel. For a detailed list of surface values, have a look at the OSM Wiki.

Finding if a road is narrow or not is very difficult and mostly based on guessing. We try to guess if a road s narrow or not by using different sets of attributes, however it is difficult to exactly determine if a road is narrow or not.

Please also have a look at this site, where we describe non OSM related causes for incorrect turn instructions.

If the instructions at a roundabout are not correct, for example, instead of “take exit X at roundabout” you receive a turn instruction like “turn slight right/left”, this usually means that the roundabout is not tagged correctly. Every roundabout has to be tagged with junction=roundabout. See the OSM wiki for more details.

If the exit number or roundabout orientation is not correct this is usually because the direction of roundabouts is incorrect (usually happens in countries with left-hand traffic). Kurviger and OSM can handle roundabouts in both directions, the direction only needs to be correctly specified.

If a street name is missing for a turn instruction, this usually indicates that the name tag is missing for the way after the turn. Usually it happens that street names are not tagged for very short ways, if this way is directly after the turn, we cannot create a street name for the turn. Have a look at the OSM wiki for more details.

OSM contains so called turn restrictions. Kurviger tries to follow these restrictions. We have seen several cases where turn restrictions were not tagged or not properly tagged. If you find such a case, please contact us or create a note in OSM. To find turn restrictions, you can use this overpass query.

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  • Last modified: 2019/09/18 10:24
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