Improved lower bound on the geometric dilation of point sets

Let G be an embedded planar graph whose edges are curves. The detour between two points p and q (on edges or vertices) of G is the length of a shortest path connecting p and q in G divided by their Euclidean distance |pq|. The maximum detour over all pairs of points is called the geometric dilation δ(G). EbbersBaumann, Grüne and Klein have shown that every finite point set is contained in a planar graph whose geometric dilation is at most 1.678, and some point sets require graphs with dilation δ ≥ π/2 ≈ 1.57. They conjectured that the lower bound is not tight. We use new ideas, a disk packing result and arguments from convex geometry, to prove this conjecture. The lower bound is improved to (1 + 10)π/2.