from https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Top_Ten_Tasks#Pedestrian_and_bike_routing_on_areas

Pedestrian and bike routing on areas

• What's involved: algorithms, routing engines
• Who can you talk to: dev mailing list or EWG
• What's being done already: see list below

The goal of this task is to implement correct distance calculation and connectivity across plazas (including to inner rings of multipolygons), and visual display of the resulting route.

Plazas and squares are a prominent feature of pedestrian networks and have been mapped as highway=pedestrian/footway/... + area=yes for a long time. Still, none of the routing engines included on osm.org currently support this feature, which leads to mapping for the router and undersells the data quality of OSM.

This feature can be implemented using any pedestrian router that fulfils the inclusion criteria for osm.org.

Previous work:

• User:Maxbe/Routen über Flächen – comprehensive, illustrated user page on the topic (German)
• Area routing for pedestrian/bike graphhopper/graphhopper#82 - for many links to code and papers

This issue comes from the OSM Top Ten Tasks page