This is brilliant. Just such a useful idea. But I would say that this should have been 'mobile first', and would strongly suggest expending effort on mobile experience. This is large and by far something I'd be more likely to use on my phone than anywhere else and its very hard to use on the phone right now
Maybe also have URLs update automatically for copying and pasting? At the moment, it stays as http://road.li/
Allowing people to share URLs might increase adoption of the site. You need to make use of your site a habit or people will think "Neat" and then forget about it.
It was very fast for me from South Australia. Design needs work, but functionality was decent. Well done.
This is super cool! I can't tell you how many times I've been driving between LA and San Diego or LA and San Francisco, and just wanted to find a coffee shop, edible food, or even a gas station. For all the things Google maps is great at, this is not one of them (despite some of the comments here to the contrary). Great work, and if you'd care for some unsolicited advice, a mobile optimized version would make this a killer roadtrip companion, and if you wanted to, you could certainly wrap it in an app and sell it.
Indeed. I would also recommend giving your users a way to reach out (twitter, fb etc).
Incidentally, I'm running late to a birthday party and I'm trying to pick up a gift on the way. I couldn't remember the site URL and had to spend some time searching through HN to find it.
If you're using Google Maps and are looking at a route from A to B, you can click any point on the path and drag it to anywhere on the map, and the route will update to pass through the point you selected. Example: http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2835/9667570442_4689c021f7_o.p...
The only downside is you can't search for the place to stop at, you have to find it on the map.
Until the recent UI overhaul, you could add additional stopping points, and drag to reorder them. It made solving the traveling salesman problem... I mean planning circuitous routes easier.
This is referring to all the push to use "The New Google Maps". One is not currently obligated to use it, but it's there and being pushed. He seems to be using it.
Great idea. I often like to find something "along the way", especially for long road trips.
Just a datapoint, trying to find a Boston Market along my route gave me lots of results that weren't a Boston Market. You might need to do a little better matching on the via portion of the data.
OP may want to partner with lodging sites - road-weary travelers may
not know where they will want to spend the night until late in the
day, and the less expensive motel choices are often in smaller towns
on their route, so a "search along route" function can be more
useful than tools like Around Me with a "search around placename"
function that requires iteration over many placenames.
I tried "Boston Market" between San Mateo and San Jose, and got 7 results,
of which 2 were Boston Market locations, 1 a Harry's Hofbrau, 2 more
are probably restaurants, and 2 appear to be unrelated.
Trying Boston Market "without quotes" produced many more results,
including all the above, and also "Putnam Lexus," "Intel Capital,"
"eBay," "Aol," and, more tellingly, the "Fish Market" near Fry's in PA.
So, users should employ double quotes in multi-word searches,
and be selective in choosing from the results.
The difference here is Google requires you to give a specific location (e.g., an "instance" of McDonalds), whereas my tool helps you decide which location to stop at when there are many workable options along your route.
It's still baffling to me that they got rid of multiple-stage trip routing. Sure, you can drag the route to add waypoints - but it's nowhere near as precise as providing an address, and gets complicated once you start needing to add three or four stops along a route.
Feedback: I clicked on the suggestion "Boston to Providence via McDonalds." Then I decided to try entering the information I wished I'd had on my Labor Day road trip: where was the most convenient place to stop at In'N'Out? But after I typed my California zip code as the origin, before I could start typing my destination, the page went completely unresponsive for 10+ seconds. Apparently it was too eager and immediately started trying to find all the closest McDonalds on the route between my California town and Providence, Rhode Island.
Suggestion – add Yelp ratings for destinations. I find myself taking long trips from point A to point B, and always feel like I'm missing out on things along the way. If I knew that the world's best coffee shop (according to Yelp) was just 4 minutes off my route, I'd love to stop.
Here's a handy little problem you can solve with road.li - There are 5162 KFC outlets in USA. Say I want to eat a chicken breast at every one of these locations. What's the shortest route that connects all 5162 locations ? Do a topological sort of all kfc locations and run road.li iteratively ie. route from kfc-1 to kfc-3 via kfc-2, kfc-3 to kfc-5 via kfc-4, etc. until kfc-5162 - that should be a bloody interesting map. KFC will fork out hard cash for that sort of thing.
"What's the shortest route that connects all 5162 locations"
AKA Traveling salesman problem? Even with a few hundred cities that would be difficult to find the optimal solution, let alone thousands. You could find a decent to even good solution with other algorithms, though
One thing to note about this specific problem: this is an example of the traveling salesman problem with a metric. This makes efficient (good) approximation algorithms a possibility.
Many NP-hard approximation algorithms classes teach a 1.5 approx known as the Christofides algorithm. This algorithm is guaranteed to provide an approximate solution that is no worse than 1.5 times the optimal total distance, and often much better.
If you have a helicopter and a burning desire to visit all 478 KFC locations in California, give this to your pilot: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/22934979/CA_KFC_LK.jpg. I used the 2D Euclidean distance between each location and the Lin-Kernighan heuristic [1], so scaling it out to the entire U.S. wouldn't be hard if the data was available.
However, it would be nice to give a link to the homepage of each option, especially when the user searched for something vague like "cafe" rather than a specific chain and so might want additional information before deciding which to visit.
Go from: Columbia, MD to: Hampden, Baltimore, MD via: goodwill
It overlays the goodwill stores on your route and then puts the one with the least time out of your way on the top of the results. That'll save you time from having to first figure out which B to use, then do the mapping between it and A and C.
....Granted, the first two goodwill locations no longer exist, but that's Google's fault for not delisting them. This thing seems to be really promising.
The old maps still does that, but it does not pick the ones along your route and sort based on shortest trip. In any case, used to is not really useful.
