AbstractIn this work, we propose an improved alternative route calculation based on alternative figures, which is suitable for practical environments. The improvement is based on the fact that the main traffic route is the road network skeleton in a city. Our approach using nodes may generate a higher possibility of overlapping. We employ a bidirectional Dijkstra algorithm to search the route. To measure the quality of an Alternative Figures (AG), three quotas are proposed. The experiment results indicate that the improved algorithm proposed in this paper is more effective than others.