  Since 1997 there has been a steady stream of advances for the maximum
disjoint paths problem. Achieving tractable results has usually required
focusing on relaxations such as: (i) to allow some bounded edge congestion in
solutions, (ii) to only consider the unit weight (cardinality) setting, (iii)
to only require fractional routability of the selected demands (the
all-or-nothing flow setting). For the general form (no congestion, general
weights, integral routing) of edge-disjoint paths ({\sc edp}) even the case of
unit capacity trees which are stars generalizes the maximum matching problem
for which Edmonds provided an exact algorithm. For general capacitated trees,
Garg, Vazirani, Yannakakis showed the problem is APX-Hard and Chekuri, Mydlarz,
Shepherd provided a $4$-approximation. This is essentially the only setting
where a constant approximation is known for the general form of \textsc{edp}.
We extend their result by giving a constant-factor approximation algorithm for
general-form \textsc{edp} in outerplanar graphs. A key component for the
algorithm is to find a {\em single-tree} $O(1)$ cut approximator for
outerplanar graphs. Previously $O(1)$ cut approximators were only known via
distributions on trees and these were based implicitly on the results of Gupta,
Newman, Rabinovich and Sinclair for distance tree embeddings combined with
results of Anderson and Feige.
