Show HN: Find the fastest route via a place | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Find the fastest route via a place

road.li

88 pointsFriedPickles52 comments

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

Agreed, or at least a breakpoint at ~720 that makes it stack vertically (i.e. http://cl.ly/image/0m30232n1N1A)

That looks great, thanks. I'll try to make this happen soon.

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.

Thanks anyhow!

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.

"Until the recent UI overhaul"? I still have the feature exactly as you described it in my browser.

Dragging to change the route is still there, but multiple stops (more than just A & B) are not.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2013/08/04/goog...

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.

On that note, I'd love a Google Maps feature to see duration along the route so I can see where I'll be around lunch and dinner time on a road trip.

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 classic google maps lets you do this with any number of points. Just the new maps removed this feature:

https://www.google.com/maps?saddr=Mineta+San+Jose+Internatio...

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.

Likewise. I did a search in one country, started a new one in a new country and it's still locked up. Couldn't even close the tab. (Chrome, OSX).

Really neat app, though!

This is great.

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.

This is quite neat. Any way to extract the directions once I decide which way point I want to go through?

Thanks! There's a small "Open this route in Google Maps" link that will give directions via the selected location.

I'm playing with ideas to make that more prominent.

How about when you click one of the suggestions, go ahead and open the route in google maps.

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.

Then try Domino's, Taco Bell etc.

http://ezlocal.com/blog/post/10-largest-fast-food-chains-in-...

"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.

For the ambitious, some of the leading code for solving the TSP to optimality is Concorde (at best it has optimally solved an 85,900 "city" instance): http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/concorde/downloads/download...

or solve/run Concorde on Argonne National Laboratory's server here:

http://neos.mcs.anl.gov/neos/solvers/co:concorde/TSP.html

Disclaimer: free for academic use

Ah, cool. So I guess I was wrong that a 5k-city solution was infeasible.

If he can solve that little problem I'm pretty sure Google will pay a tad bit more than KFC...

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin%E2%80%93Kernighan_heuristi...

How did you do this?

Very impressive! Pls post a link to your code if you don't mind.

https://github.com/dbarlett/KFC-Tour

Now uses the the Concorde cutting-plane-based exact TSP solver.

Edit: I really should have named the repo colonel-sanders.

Oh! That's awesome once you figure out what it is!

You should make it clearer that the big feature is the "via" !

It's presented as an after thought on the website's design, while it is in fact the main feature.

We did something similar for vienna last year as a research project (german only). http://www.myits.at/ http://www.myits.at/mobile

This looks really useful.

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.

maps.google.com does this exactly with a few extra clicks:

Click "Get directions" button, click the "Add Destination" link, fill in A, B, and C then click the "Did you mean a different..."

Awesome work on this.

Another idea for you: I'd like to put in multiple competing places to see which is optimal. Should I go to Wendy's or Burger King on the way?

Similarly, I often have errands to run and 4-5 locations and it's not immediately obvious which route and order I should go to each of them.

This is one feature that I miss from my Garmin GPS -- ability to set a route, and then search for locations or types of locations along the route.

I love this. Make it an app please! I've downloaded multiple apps thinking they'd include this feature and none have. Very useful.

It's not obvious what kind of places you can specify in the "via" field... it would be nice to have autocompletion there. too.

this is great, I was thinking of building something similar, but it didn't seem like the route finding APIs were there at the time.

It seems to side step a lot of the problems I'd imagined... a great way to solve this problem I hadn't thought of before.

It'd be interesting to see what it would be like for n legs of a journey (for n number of place searches)

I was looking for something like this for so long, very useful!.

Awesome! Does this use openstreetmap data, or what data set?

Needs some debouncing! Other than that, it's awesome.

Lol, i can just find route A to B and then B to C.

With this app, B is a category ("hardware store" or "bank"), rather than a specific location. That's the innovation.

Google Maps used to do that.

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.

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.

Needs bike directions.

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