openrouteservice Bad Wheelchair Routing With Seperately Mapped Sidewalks

Hello!

Been mapping sidewalks separately in my local area and found that the wheelchair routing does not use the separately mapped sidewalks which is the main benefit of separately mapped sidewalks that they enable more accessible navigation.

Unfortunately when testing it produced this horrible route that was not even slightly wheelchair accessible (having visited the path it was suggesting previously in my power chair.)

Would love if the wheelchair nav used the sidewalks!

Oct 03 '25 23:10 CanopusFalling

Potentially ignore this, found out the data in the routing engine might not have been up to date yet. Would love info about that.

Oct 03 '25 23:10 CanopusFalling

Hi @CanopusFalling ,

thanks for reporting! Normally, the wheelchair profile should use sidewalk information, so I guess it is due to the data not yet being used by ORS. You can find details about the update cycle in our FAQ: https://openrouteservice.org/faq/. If the issue still persists in a few weeks we are happy if you let us know.

Oct 06 '25 07:10 sfendrich

Thank you for the info @sfendrich !

I'm periodically checking in on the route to see if everything works out, it does seem to be routing much better now but there's still some weird artifacts. Is there any way to toggle a debug to check if this odd behavior is due to something going wrong with routing or if the data is not fully up to date yet.

Oct 08 '25 02:10 CanopusFalling

The easiest way for us to investigate such an issue is, if you post the request URL from one of the maps clients:

https://maps.openrouteservice.org
https://classic-maps.openrouteservice.org

Oct 09 '25 06:10 sfendrich

I've transferred the issue to the openrouteservice repo as I believe it's actually about how the route is being computed.

Oct 09 '25 06:10 aoles

Thanks for your feedback @CanopusFalling 💚

Someone from the ORS team will have a closer look and get back to you soon.

Please note that the timestamp of the OSM data used for computing the route is reported in the metadata.engine.osm_date field of the API's response. You can observe it from your browser's developer console under the network tab where the JSON response can be viewed. A the time of writing it's 2025-09-22T00:00:02Z.

Cheers! Andrzej

Oct 09 '25 07:10 aoles