  The problem of providing meaningful routing directions over road networks is
of great importance. In many real-life cases, the fastest route may not be the
ideal choice for providing directions in written, spoken text, or for an
unfamiliar neighborhood, or in cases of emergency. Rather, it is often more
preferable to offer "simple" directions that are easy to memorize, explain,
understand or follow. However, there exist cases where the simplest route is
considerably longer than the fastest. This paper tries to address this issue,
by finding near-simplest routes which are as short as possible and near-fastest
routes which are as simple as possible. Particularly, we focus on efficiency,
and propose novel algorithms, which are theoretically and experimentally shown
to be significantly faster than existing approaches.
