Posts Tagged ‘directions’

Thats a mighty long way!

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Google have recently added walking directions to the Directions feature on Google Maps.

This is a nice addition, and of course its early days, but does throw up some interesting results. The post says “If you’re going 10 km or less (some call this 6.2 miles)”, but if you want to test it out on longer routes, just add &dirflg=w to the url (use the “Link to this Page” link to get a link for the current map), and it does work!

Luckily it knows to avoid using the Motorway (phew!), but it still does favour bigger roads as noted here. Hopefully with time it can pickup on the shortest route rather than the ‘quickest’ which is generally what is used for driving.

I wonder if we will ever get to the point that it includes public footpaths here in the UK? (maybe it will via OSM?) – and as a refinement it could favour known ‘long distance footpaths’ …

Update: GEarthBlog also points out that can use my multi direction to KML tool, to view walking directions in Google Earth! Thanks Frank!

Search along a route

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

As a very rough, but somewhat nifty, proof of concept have created a little page, that answers (or attempts to!) the old age question of “Where is the best place to stop off for pizza along my route?”

Search along a route

as mentioned its very approximate, the search alogorithm is crude, I am certain there are better ways of doing it, anyone fancy taking it on?

Howto: Save Directions to a MyMap (GoogleMaps)

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

Google Maps doesn’t include a method to save ‘Driving Directions’ easily into MyMaps. Fortunately they do include KML import/export for most features, so can export the route as KML then reimport it into a My Map.

I’ve moved the meat of this post to a Thread on the Google Maps Group, better for Google to be hosting it :)