Using Free and Proprietary Data to Compare Shortest-Path Lengths for Effective Pedestrian Routing in Street Networks

Ubiquitous mobile devices, such as smartphones, led to an increased popularity of pedestrian-related routing applications over the past few years. Because pedestrians typically aim to minimize their walking distance, especially in nonrecreational and multimodal trips, pedestrian routing systems will be fully used only if they can find the correct shortest path and thus help to avoid unnecessary detours. The standard equipment of car navigation systems based on the Global Positioning System several years ago led to the availability of accurate street network data for car-based routing applications. However, pedestrian routing applications should consider pedestrian-related network segments besides those used by motorized traffic, including footpaths and pedestrian bridges. The authors of this paper performed a shortest-path analysis of pedestrian routes for cities in Germany and the United States. For a set of 1,000 randomly generated origin–destination pairs, the authors compared the lengths of pedestrian routes that were computed by different freely available network sources, such as OpenStreetMap and TIGER/Line data, and proprietary data sets, such as TomTom, NAVTEQ, and ATKIS. The results showed that freely available data sources such as OpenStreetMap provided a relatively comprehensive option for cities in which commercial pedestrian data sets were not yet available.