Frequently Asked Questions
Quick answers to what students ask most when they first try RouteU / CampusWay — the free campus navigation tool for college students.
How accurate is the walking-time data?
How accurate is the walking-time data?
Walking times use the OSRM routing engine over OpenStreetMap road and pathway networks, so outdoor segments — walks between buildings, around quads, across campus — are accurate to within roughly plus or minus ten percent of a real walk. Inside a building (floor changes, indoor hallways, the short cut from the lobby to the lecture hall), we fall back to straight-line haversine math, so those estimates are looser. Use RouteU to plan "can I make my class in seven minutes," not for ADA-accessibility routing or door-to-door timing.
What if my campus isn't covered yet?
What if my campus isn't covered yet?
We index more than 7,000 US campuses today — the live count shows on the RouteU homepage. If your school isn't loaded yet, type any building or city into the search bar at the map page and we'll surface the closest matches plus a quick way to flag it. You can also drop your school's name into the "For Universities" form at the bottom of the homepage; we batch-update top-requested campuses weekly, so a popular request typically lands in the next expansion pass.
How often is the building and room data refreshed?
How often is the building and room data refreshed?
Data-only SQL updates — the migrations folder that adds new buildings, rooms, and campuses — deploy through Polsia's fallback path in under a minute with no app restart, so corrections and new campus content go live almost the moment they're committed. We don't stop at manual edits, either: a recurring audit cron under polsia.toml plus the dedicated /api/admin/uiuc-room-gap operator endpoint actively review how many rooms each high-traffic building has indexed and surface coverage gaps for the next sourcing pass. New buildings land about once a week, sourced from OpenStreetMap plus official campus systems like UIUC Archibus, UF Master Plan, and Ohio State GIS.
Do I need to sign up to use CampusWay?
Do I need to sign up to use CampusWay?
No — you can search buildings, browse the interactive map, and pull up walking directions anonymously. Every feature on the free tier works without an account. Sign-up is only required if you want saved favorites (the Favorites page), the Premium class-schedule integration that highlights your classrooms on the map, or to opt into the 14-day post-signup beta questionnaire that helps us improve coverage. Sign-up is just an email and password — no phone, no student-ID upload.
Does it work on mobile?
Does it work on mobile?
Yes. The whole site is fully responsive with viewports tuned for phones, the interactive map renders via Leaflet.js so it works in any modern mobile browser, and the site ships a PWA manifest — open the map in Safari or Chrome, hit the share icon and choose "Add to Home Screen" for one-tap launching from your phone's home screen. On phones, this FAQ page collapses each answer into a tap-to-expand accordion so you don't have to scroll past five long answers at once.