A Better Way To Travel | Hacker News Reader

A Better Way To Travel

onthewayapp.com

This was a fun week's worth of work for Team TeachStreet. Felt good to get everybody working on a single project (we've spent many months working on lots of different areas of the site, and working with different partners). It was really refreshing, and you could almost 'feel' morale climb, as we all had a chance to just have fun for a few days!

As a lover of road trips, I really dig what you're doing.

If I may offer two observations:

1) I would appreciate some sort of filter to hide multi-location stops like Sub-way, Exxon, etc. If you are going to have such data at all, I would appreciate the ability to hide it. I can find a gas station by reading the highway signs, but it's not as easy to find the super unique and interesting stops.

2) Scaling the page to see more of the map makes the text very difficult to read.

Anyways, pretty darn good for a week. Thanks for sharing!

@schultzy: thanks a ton for the feedback. here are my responses to each observation:

1. that makes a ton of sense. adding filtering in the future was something we were thinking about and we'll add this suggestion into that list.

2. you can always zoom the window in closer, but we'll look at making the text on the map more readable.

thanks again. :)

Hmmm. Well, the "places of interest" it suggested to me didn't look interesting, but it's nearly useful. What it really needs is just to have a "time" column estimating how far each stop is from the last one.

Maybe I just grew up watching too many NSW RTA ads, but I'm a firm believer in the principle that for safety you should stop and get out of the car every two hours. So if it could suggest stops which were spaced roughly two hours apart, it'd be useful to me.

great suggestion Hugh. We definitely want to incorporate the time of day and time between stops at some point, both for the reason you suggested as well as to be smarter about the types of attractions we suggest at different times. thanks!

That's funny you say that. The "time" situation was something we struggled with to find what the best experience would be. The questions we had were:

- Do you stop 1 hour all the time when you stop at a restaurant? What if you take it to-go?

- What if you stop at a stop like the World's Largest Frying Pan for just 5 minutes? Should we allow users to add custom time limits for each of the stops?

- Would we be complicating things adding custom times?

All great questions and things for us to think about. Thanks a ton for the feedback.

I'd only want an estimate of the travel times between destinations, not an estimate of how long I'd actually spend stopped at each (which I wouldn't attempt to estimate in advance anyway).

For me the use case is this: I want to drive from (say) San Francisco to Denver, and want to plan out a schedule which involves stopping every two hours for a break.

Ahhh...got it. Thanks for clarifying that.

Cool idea, but I'm not driving 10 miles out of the way to get to KFC/Taco Bell.

I don't think this should feature restaurants but rather "things to do", hiking trails, look outs, maybe specific food places (local legends, etc) but specifically things that "make up communities" (I think of like college football towns, etc)

Totally agree. Our first pass was to pull in location information from Google Places and Foursquare, but we feel the beauty of something like this would be the unique locations like you mentioned above.

Thanks a ton for the feedback.

Very nice project! And this is the kind of thing I always want to do: stop at weird little fun places on the way. I wish I had it when I did a cross-country trip. Looks like I had missed a few scenic drives and what not!

that's exactly what got us super excited about it. we didn't want to miss any of those cool unique place when we were going on a drive anywhere.

FYI, when there are multiple possible routes (e.g. the second when going from Dallas, TX to Surprise, AZ) and you choose one that isn't the default, the "Featured Stops" still show for the default.

@kodablah: thanks for finding that bug. a couple of folks have notified us about that, and we're working to resolve it as we speak. cheers!

@kodablah: We just fixed the bug -- let us know how it looks on your end. :)

You should try pulling from http://www.roadsideamerica.com/ That's my go to site to road trip info.

I'm getting an error when going from Seattle to Yakima, it says: "Your geographic boundary is too big. Please search a smaller area."

I'm actually getting that error 100% of the time. I tested Seattle to Redmond, and then I tested a specific address to another specific address, both in Belltown.

@zacharycohn: thanks for letting us know. we're looking into it as we speak. hold please. :)

hey zach, we just fixed the bug. just tried both seattle to redmond and seattle to yakima -- worked all the way through. let me know if there's any issues on your end still. thanks!

This is really cool - I can totally see using this!

thanks! we're looking to add more unique location data to make the experience even better.

"Featured Stops Starbucks (Coffee Shop) In-N-Out Burger (Burgers) Chevron (Gas Station / Garage) McDonald's (Fast Food) Jack in the Box (Fast Food) Los Pinos Mexican Restaurant (Mexican) Six Flags Magic Mountain (Theme Park) Westfield Valencia Town Center (Mall) Chick-fil-A (Fast Food) Porto's Bakery & Cafe (Bakery) Universal Studios Hollywood (Theme Park) IKEA (Furniture / Home)"

First page of results. LA to SF. Next page includes "IN THE MIDDLE OF F#%~*?¥! NOWHERE!!! (Farm)"

@porfirio: Thanks a lot for trying it out. We're currently pulling in data from various sources like Foursquare, Google Places, etc. -- but we do add unique stops as well. Currently we've filled out unique stops for the PNW (since we're based here), but CA is definitely one we'd like to tackle soon.

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