Avoiding Cities

[PaulS]

So I live on the west side of London in the UK, and I've been playing with ABRP in anticipation of getting a BMW i3.

A number of the routes I try, especially if they go east, want to use chargers in London because there's so many of them. Not surprising, but anyone who knows London knows that you do not want to drive in London unless you have to. Here's an example https://abetterrouteplanner.com/?plan_uuid=964151df-4f27-4cff-8d57-4652133f95aa

This wasn't the original route, but it went by a charger which I know has frequent issues (A BMW Dealer who uses the charging positions as normal parking). Once I re-plan, the route I now have uses the "North Circular" (A406) which (from experience) add an extra 60-90 minutes on the journey just from traffic alone. I'm sure it looks good to a routing engine without knowledge of traffic levels (Nice major road), but there's no way I would do this at any time of day or night.

I find I end up in a battle of excluding chargers and waypoints, as London just draws routes in like a magnet with so many chargers there. It would be nice to be able to exclude a region, or prioritise motorway(highway) based chargers in some way.

Any suggestions?

[Bill N]

Strange, but if I put "TW20 0" to Ipswich in ABRP it suggests the same route, near enough, as Google - via A406

(BTW, it may not be such a good idea to prioritise motorway based chargers in the UK, as that (currently at least) mostly means Ecotricity chargers which are notoriously unreliable and slow, especially via CCS)

[Jason-ABRP]

This is something we are working, actually, indirectly.  The main issue, as you identified, is we don't have traffic conditions knowledge.  Unfortunately, for the moment, purchasing that knowledge is rather expensive and outside our limited resources.  We're exploring alternatives, and hopefully we can come up with something good!

Of course, if you've got suggestions on how to solve this problem, we're definitely open to them!