Greenery and hill preference sliders (you can now prefer hills!)

Published 2020-07-11

Trail Router has allowed users to prefer green areas and avoid hills since its first release. These were simply on/off switches - you could not configure them. One of the very first feature requests I received after launching was the ability to prefer hills (not avoid them). This was surprising to me at the time!

I'm pleased to say that Trail Router now allows you to configure your greenery and hills preferences via sliders!

The greenery slider in action. As it moves right, it increasingly favours greenery, and you can see that the route starts to hug the river.

The greenery slider ranges from 0% (disabled) to 100%, and tells the routing engine how much weight it should give to green areas. If you set it to 'disabled', then it does not favour greenery at all, and will simply give you the shortest running route. If you set it to 100% then it will favour greenery very strongly, and will likely give you a much longer (and therefore less direct) running route which takes in more greenery.

The hills slider allows you to both avoid hills (move the slider to the left) and prefer hills (move the slider to the right). By default, there is no preference for hills at all, so the routing algorithm is blind to the hills. If you like lots of hills, move the slider to the far right and then it will take in as much elevation as possible, even at the expense of adding extra distance to your route.

In the future, it's likely that support will be added for other preferences (such as surfce type), so watch this space.