Terrain-aware routes and ride-trace cleanup

Plan walking, hiking, and cycling routes with explicit difficulty. Snap noisy GPS into clean traces with surface and grade per edge.

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Outdoor and fitness apps live or die on terrain accuracy. Users want a hike that's hard but not unreasonable, a ride that's flat for a recovery day, or a cleaned-up trace of yesterday's run with elevation gain that actually matches the watch.

Footstep returns terrain as a first-class block in every routing response: total ascent, total descent, average and max grade, and a difficulty classification (flat, rolling, hilly, mountainous). compare_routes runs walking and cycling side by side. snap_trace cleans GPS into matched road and path segments with surface and grade per edge.

Outputs are GeoJSON or encoded polyline depending on what your renderer prefers. Both ship out of the box.

Patterns

What this looks like in practice

Common shapes mapped to the tools you'd reach for.

Hike difficulty preview

User picks a trail. get_directions returns the route plus terrain.difficulty (rolling, hilly, mountainous) and total_ascent_meters. Show it before they commit.

Ride-trace cleanup

Strava-style traces come in noisy from cheap GPS. snap_trace returns a clean polyline aligned to roads and paths, with road class, surface, and grade per matched edge.

Mode comparison

compare_routes runs walking and cycling between the same points. Returns both with distance, duration, terrain, and a one-sentence summary so the app can recommend without rolling its own logic.

Tools you'll reach for