Incorporating Scenic View, Slope, and Crime Rate into Route Choices

With Global Positioning System (GPS) devices, drivers are now more confident in exploring routes out of the ordinary. More portable forms of commercial GPS navigators (GPS-embedded cell phones, MP3 players, and watches) are also available for pedestrians and bicyclists. Most route guidance applications minimize travel distance and time, which are important factors, but are not the only navigational criteria of interest to users, especially in urban and city environments. With the aid of advanced features of geographic information systems (GISs), new geospatial factors such as the three-dimensional (3-D) nature of the roads and crime rates can be included in the route guidance for broader applications. For instance, 3-D GISs can generate information on visible scenery along a given route (for tourists) or the slopes of the consecutive road segments (for pedestrians and bicyclists). In addition, pedestrians and bicyclists can opt to avoid high-crime areas. In the future, this concept of incorporating new geospatial information can be extended, for example, for computing low-elevation areas that are susceptible to flooding and hilly regions with heavy traffic. This paper presents methods of incorporating 3-D features of the roads and geospatial crime rate information for route guidance purposes. It is found that the 3-D nature of the roads and crime rate–related information can result in considerably different route choices.