making 'avoid highways' less strict?

[nograin]

Description:  currently there's only an on/off option for highways. it would be nice to have finer grained controls to make the automatic planner use highways where it makes sense or let me use highways manually.

Use Case: even on very limited range (say honda e ) oftentimes it would make sense to use highways - ie. if there's a speed limit that wouldn't let me go faster than on other roads anyways. or there could be good charging options along the highway - which currently i can't plan to go as i've enabled 'avoid highways'. the current binary solution feels rather limiting and i feel a bit more intelligence could improve routes a lot.

[PantsManUK]

Since completing a (for me) long trip for vacation purposes, I'd like to add/offer the ability to explicitly avoid a particular road; I live inside the UKs M25, I needed to get outside the M25 as part of this journey, and from a routing perspective using the M25 itself makes sense (get on at junction X, come off at junction Y), but I don't like driving on the M25 due to the excessive noise the surface causes in our Zoe. In this particular case, I was able to use a waypoint to get me close enough to the road I actually needed to take such that I could avoid using the M25 directly while still using other motorways elsewhere on the route, but just being able to "Avoid: M25" would have been my preferred solution.

[Samuel-ABRP]

@nograin you could set max speed to whatever the max speed on other roads besides highways is. The highways and other roads should be treated equally then, if they have the same max drivable speed. If the non-highway road is short, it should then actually prefer it, as you will not be faster on the highway anyways with that max speed. It will still route you through highways if they are the better choice or only charging option.

[nograin]

 

not sure this can work as off the highway the max speed can't be known/isn't constant - it differs for every route, i can't know the amount of cities/villages and their speedlimits in advance.

so the planner most always will prefer a highway as there it can go the max speed i set while the average max speed on other roads is lower.

testing this further i'm nearly always able to click myself a faster route (including charging) with guidepoints on a mix of roads than the automatic planner comes up with with either highways off or on. so it seems it still lacks some intelligence to make it the better routeplanner

 

 

[Samuel-ABRP]

In most cases the slower roads are shorter, so even if you set a speed that matches the maximum speed allowed outside motorways (for example 80 in France, 100 in Germany) the slower roads will most likely be faster even if they go through villages, as they are still shorter. If it is the same length there shouldn't be any problems taking the motorway and just drive with that slower speed if it is still the best option, or not?

[Samuel-ABRP]

So i just tried this with Honda E. No additional settings (130km/h) takes this route (3h27min [or-9min on alt route], 2 charge stops, all motorway):
https://abetterrouteplanner.com/?plan_uuid=3c35503b-6fa2-452d-983e-b53371aeb372

When i lower speed to 100 it takes this route (3h3, 1 charge stop, until charge stop only slower streets):
https://abetterrouteplanner.com/?plan_uuid=e453449b-6b8b-4715-8621-2d00277489e1


So I think my proposal still works...

If you want to enforce slower roads even more just go down to as low as 80 or 90 and keep some margin to drive faster when needed.

But using a guide point is of course another valid approach for forcing a specific route. You could plan a route with normal settings and if you see a road that fits more your needs just select it and create a new route again.