Border passing problem

Hi, today my friend realized me some not so funny story. Namely he traveled from Poland to Latvia, and his navigation (commercial one) suggested a way trough Belarus. But you can not enter Belarus without a visa (at least if you are from Poland). Hence I wanted to check OSM data against that problem. Here is what OSRM have done with that: http://map.project-osrm.org/?hl=pl&loc=53.212593,23.161808&loc=54.684288,25.285292&z=8&center=53.792539,23.367920&alt=0&df=0&re=0&ly=763558683 (so answer is not the expected one). Even with the visa it can be not so clever solution - passing borders can take significant time.
The open question is, what can we do with such a problems - add some information in data (visa required or not - but this is complicated - people from some countries can probably enter Belarus (for example) without visa…). Should navigation software minimize the number of border passing - the answer is in general negative either… Of course the simplest solution is “do not download Belarus (for example) map, if you don’t have a visa”, however sometimes we download a maps in packs (for example East Europe).
Maybe some day we will have a solution, nowadays just have it in your mind… especially if you live in shengen zone ;).

IMHO, it’s up to the traveler to make sure that she has all the necessary paper work done. Do you want to include all the different rules that countries force upon dog owners as well ?
Or that you have to check the insurance of your car (not all car insurances cover all countries) ?

Look at map in the link. He has all the papers he need to travel to Lithuania and Poland has border with Lithuania, no need to pass through Belarus. Just navigation software has took that way as shorter one (which wasn’t so obvious - also because the original starting point was much further from that border).
Moreover, as I wrote before, I do not expect solution is easy, nor it have be done with adding data to OSM. I just wrote: have it in mind… (probably especially when you download a new mapset for your car navigation :wink: )

There is a little part of Belgium that is completely surrounded by The Netherlands. Luckily Belgians do not need special papers to travel between the two countries … :slight_smile: