English summary: Our nation is now divided into two. Not all resources are evenly distributed: the other part has 12 times more national parks than the other. Calculations made show that having nation divided results 227 kilometres more driving. Tiivistelmä suomeksi: Maamme on nyt jakautunut kahtia eikä kaikki resussit ole jakautuneet tasan, esimerkiksi kansallispuistoja on toisilla 12-kertainen määrä. Tässä tehty laskelma osoittaa, että maan jakaminen kahtia tuottaa 227 kilometria enemmän ajoa.
Visiting national parks
About four years ago I decided to find out how long drive it would be to visit all Finnish national parks. There are 40 of those and based on my calculations, one needs to drive no more than 4922 kilometers to visit them all. I have visited 23 of them so far. Our family has decided that one must either stay overnight or hike a trail of several kilometres to meet a criteria for a visit. So just driving though or visiting parking is not sufficient. Hope next summer our family will collect some more.
COVID-19 impact on travelling
On 25 March 2020, the Finnish government proposed to Parliament that traffic between the region of Uusimaa and other regions in Finland be restricted from 27 March to 19 April 2020. Roadblocks were set up on the main roads and smaller roads were monitored. Only essential traffic related for duty or taking care of family members is allowed.
Recreational travel is prohibited, although I would argue that visiting nature sights is another compelling personal reason. But I guess police won’t buy that argument.
As the result, our nation is divided into two disjoint areas, the one having 37 national parks and the other only three:
Tammisaari archipelago
Nuuksio
Sipoonkorpi
To visit these three, there is not much to calculate as the travelling salesman problem is trivial for three points: it would be 277 kilometre drive from wherever you start and wherever you go.
Natural parks on non-Uusimaa area
It would be interesting to know how much shorter the path for the rest of 37 national parks would be. At the first I tried to just remove Uusimaa national parks from the distance matrix. But turns out, the Valkmusa-Teijo pair will end into the shortest path anyway. And the best route between them goes directly through the capital area.
Then I tried another simple solution. I decided to filter distance matrix with following rule: if a national park pair is south of 60.67N and the other is east of 24.8E and other is west of that, then the distance is set to 10000 km. Turns out, this was not sufficient either because one east-west road goes south of Hyvinkää that is part of Uusimaa. And that is the shortest route between Leivonmäki next to Jyväskylä and Liesjärvi next to Forssa, partially on Uusimaa. The point I used for Liesjärvi is within Kanta-Häme region.
Route via Hyvinkää
So those simple solutions were not sufficient. Then I started to consider that maybe I can cut the Uusimaa out from finland-2016-05-01.osm.pbf map database extract and make new routing table based on that. I could have downloaded newer database but wanted to use the same 2016 version: after all, we are comparing two cases and if source data is different then it not known where the differences originate from.
There is a nice service at http://polygons.openstreetmap.fr/ that provides one a poly-file for a OSM relation. The only challenge was that there is no polygon “Non-Uusimaa Finland”. So I downloaded a simplified polygon for Finland (54224) and Uusimaa (37355). There maybe a way to do that automatically but it was also quite easy to do that manually.
First I reversed Uusimaa points to have “upper” part of Uusimaa to be in the same order as the Finland points. Then I searched approximate point where to join these. Removed the southernmost segments from both and installed Uusimaa in the middle of Finland polygon. Small errors were not a problem because there are no roads middle of Gulf of Finland.
Then I run osmosis with that polygon file on the OSM extract and generated routino database using the resulting file.
Then regenerated distance matrix, run the genetic algorithm and collected the results as with the last time. It was nice to notice that tools I used four years earlier (python pandas and numpy, and routino) have not implemented incompatible changes but the scripts run without any modifications.
The result: not much savings
The result, the path including 37 national parks and not travelling through Uusimaa, is 4872 kilometres long. By avoiding Uusimaa, one saves only 50 kilometres in the total distance and misses three national parks. Of which at least two have been quite crowded with people trying to enforce social distancing and improve their well-being.
That 50 km is actually less than the shortest of the distances between those three Uusimaa national parks, the one between Nuuksio and Sipoonkorpi, 55.1 km.
Patvinsuo
Petkeljärvi
Kolovesi
Linnansaari
Repovesi
Itäinen Suomenlahti
Valkmusa
Liesjärvi
Torronsuo
Teijo
Saaristomeri
Kurjenrahka
Selkämeri
Puurijärvi ja Isosuo
Lauhanvuori-Pohjankangas
Kauhaneva
Seitseminen
Helvetinjärvi
Isojärvi
Päijänne
Leivonmäki
Etelä Konnevesi
Pyhä-Häkki
Salamajärvi
Rokua
Perämeri
Yllästunturi-Pallas
Urho Kekkonen
Lemmenjoki
Luosto-Pyhä
Oulanka
Riisitunturi
Syöte
Hossa
Hiidenportti
Tillikkajärvi
Koli
So at the end the route is similar to the original. Sipoonkorpi and Nuuksio are missing between Valkmusa and Liesjärvi and Tammisaari archipelago between Teijo and Saaristomeri.
Hope the COVID-19 situation will get better soon and restrictions can be lifted without putting anyone for risk. I would like to get more magnets into our camping car fridge in July.
