Miles or km

[Neogeografen]

Congratulation having bicycle navigation now.
I was testing the bicycle route on your release page/map
https://www.mapbox.com/blog/bicycle-directions/

However as an bicyclist from a country (Denmark) which use km as standard - I would like to see km as part of the route description and not mention route description in miles when doing a A-B query.

Can this be fixed with language detection like "de, da, fi , fr, es" etc" would go to a km version and for other languages using miles goes to another version?

[thanosbellos]

It would be great to offer something like that. I mean the core of the plugin uses the metric system. I digged up in the code and in routes_control.js and i noticed that after a successful response is received from the map-directions api , the corresponding routes are used to fill the information in the container with classs "mapbox-directions-routes". This container is filled with an unorder list , with routes being the list items. Every list item is filled with route details (duration , distance , etc).

//using only a part of the code
directions.on('load', function (e) {
        container.html('');

        var routes = container.append('ul')
            .selectAll('li')
            .data(e.routes)
            .enter().append('li')
            .attr('class', 'mapbox-directions-route');

        routes.append('div')
            .attr('class','mapbox-directions-route-heading')
            .text(function (route) { return 'Route ' + (e.routes.indexOf(route) + 1); });

        routes.append('div')
            .attr('class', 'mapbox-directions-route-summary')
            .text(function (route) { return route.summary; });
//here come the miles!!!!!!!!
        routes.append('div')
            .attr('class', 'mapbox-directions-route-details')
            .text(function (route) { return format.imperial(route.distance) + ', ' + format.duration(route.duration); });

routes.distance is on meters and the routes-control converts them to miles

so it could be done i guess.
I would suggest that an option on

  var directions = L.mapbox.directions(system: 'metric') ;

and it could be interpolated on the corresponding line ,
or select format conditionally

var directions = L.mapbox.directions({useMetricSystem: true});

I am gonna try this tomorrow but i am not sure that would be wise because i may have missed so many things in the code , that it could mess it up.

For my project , if this doesn't work i am gonna try something else:
I will try to detect( DOMSubtreeModified event i guess) and change tha value using jquery

Btw the information in meters is right there for us:

//lets say you have initialized a mydirections object
mydirections = L.mapbox.directions();

//after a route has been retrieved and drawn
//the distance in meters is available
// lets say there is only one route availble(route[0])
console.log(mydirections.directions.routes[0].distance);
//tadummmmm in meters

[jfirebaugh]

@thanosbellos If you want to make a PR, that would be great. How about L.mapbox.directions({units: 'metric'})?

[thanosbellos]

Off course!! I have just started implementing the idea. I hope i 'll soon have it right.

[thanosbellos]

Proposed an implementation on pull request #78 . I hope it helps !!!