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

Show HN: Find the fastest route via a place

road.li

19 pointsFriedPickles17 comments

Can it be modified to support more than one "via place"? And what if I don't really care about the order I visit each location, but just want to minimize total length?

It's rare that I like something both as a joke and as a real feature request.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6322875

I reposted because I've made some improvements and open sourced it since then.

I tested going from my house, to a pizza joint, to work with both your site and with google and got the same result. The only difference is that google gave me a straight forward total time, while I have to do the math on your site and its a smaller map.

I think what separates your service from what google does is that it embeds the search in your route - so that I can choose between different places along the route, which is cool. I know I am always wanting to know what is the best place to stop for food along my route home that I haven't tried and it is a bit cumbersome with the way google is set up.

I would make that much clearer up front in how yours is different than google because I got the same "result" after I selected the place I wanted. As it is you are focusing on telling people about the result, rather than the options along the route, which is the real service.

I was just testing OsmAnd, this fits in nicely. So I try the same route...

> Roadli currently only supports trips shorter than 300 km

Okay great. So basically you made something that can do less than Google Maps, TomTom and OsmAnd can? Especially if you include the option to add an N number of waypoints.

This is cool. I'd love to see via multiple places, since I'm sometimes borrowing a car for an hour and optimizing for running as many errands as I can (e.g., dry cleaners, grocery store, hardware store), and it would be great if they were all close.

Can't I just add the destination of a McDonalds or something to my route in Google Maps? I don't see the need for this?

This gives you the McDonalds that minimizes the overall distance traveled.

But Google Maps, especially Google Now can tell me the closest one.

True, but this is useful if you want to stop somewhere along the way somewhere. For example, I've had a few instances where I wanted to stop by a store on the way home from work. This would find the best one to stop at on the way home. Google Maps just shows me the closest one to my current location - I don't really care where it is, or when I stop at it, as long as it is on my way home.

Ah okay, I see your point. That does make sense then!

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