3 posts tagged with "valhalla"

A walking route across a city and a hiking route up a mountain should not share the same clock.

That sounds obvious until you ask a routing engine for an ETA. Most routing systems are good at distance, turn costs, access rules, and road classes. Hiking time is different. A two-kilometer trail can be easy, slow, dangerous, or all three depending on slope, descent, surface, visibility, and how the local trail network publishes reference times.

For Globus routing, this matters because we use Valhalla deeply. Valhalla already has the graph, the route shape, and elevation in the tiles. The question was whether we could use that information to make hiking ETAs less optimistic without breaking tile compatibility or inventing a regional formula that only works in one mountain range.

Over the last research pass, we built the corpus, tested the formulas, rejected several tempting models, used a deliberately expensive research hook to learn what worked, and then moved the result into production-shaped Valhalla code.

The first Globus predicted-traffic release for Valhalla had a deliberately simple shape: coverage everywhere, richer temporal detail only where the data could carry it.

That was the right place to start.

The June navigation data update keeps the same product promise. There is still no new API, no separate traffic overlay, and no integration change for SDK customers. The traffic layer is still baked into the regular map and navigation data update.

What changed is the model's judgment underneath.

It now handles local time correctly, treats recent evidence more carefully, and refuses to widen weekly profiles where freshness already explains the signal better.

It is Monday, 08:12. A delivery driver leaves the depot on a route the dispatcher built on Sunday afternoon. The routing engine that built it does not know that the arterial out of the warehouse jams between 08:00 and 08:30. The driver does. So does anyone who lives nearby. Every minute the engine does not know costs someone — the driver, the customer, the company.

Predicted traffic is the routing feature most people assume already works. In Valhalla, it can — once someone does the work to feed it well. Over the last several months at Globus, we have done that work.

This post is what we shipped, what we threw away, and why a deliberately small layer ended up mattering more than a flashy one.