
Show HN: Find the fastest route via a place - FriedPickles
http://road.li
======
rwhitman
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

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

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

~~~
prawn
Maybe also have URLs update automatically for copying and pasting? At the
moment, it stays as [http://road.li/](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.

------
thesash
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.

~~~
erikig
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!

------
aaronpk
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...](http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2835/9667570442_4689c021f7_o.png)

The only downside is you can't search for the place to stop at, you have to
find it on the map.

~~~
zeckalpha
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.

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

~~~
emhs
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.

------
johnnyo
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.

~~~
dmckeon
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.

------
n00j
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...](https://www.google.com/maps?saddr=Mineta+San+Jose+International+Airport+\(SJC\),+1701+Airport+Blvd,+San+Jose,+CA&daddr=San+Mateo,+CA+to:San+Francisco+International+Airport,+San+Francisco,+CA+to:San+Francisco,+CA&hl=en&sll=37.56744,-122.170715&sspn=0.476771,0.686646&geocode=FXs1OgIdAIC7-CE-
fvZtP0T6vCmbxbP6w8uPgDE-
fvZtP0T6vA%3BFXAqPQId63W1-ClFVanvYJ6PgDGnG8wt9PyO_Q%3BFRT7PQId3Ii0-CE_7c0aV1zypClVVVVVjHePgDE_7c0aV1zypA%3BFVJmQAIdKAe0-CkhAGkAbZqFgDH_rXbwZxNQSg&oq=San+M&mra=ps&t=m&z=11)

~~~
FriedPickles
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.

------
thisisnotatest
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.

~~~
aptwebapps
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!

------
beh
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.

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

~~~
FriedPickles
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.

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

------
dxbydt
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-...](http://ezlocal.com/blog/post/10-largest-fast-food-chains-in-the-
us.aspx)

~~~
jffry
"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

~~~
pyk
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...](http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/concorde/downloads/downloads.htm)

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

[http://neos.mcs.anl.gov/neos/solvers/co:concorde/TSP.html](http://neos.mcs.anl.gov/neos/solvers/co:concorde/TSP.html)

Disclaimer: free for academic use

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

------
Raphmedia
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.

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

------
jamessb
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.

------
smokestack
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..."

------
joshdotsmith
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?

~~~
proexploit
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.

------
sardonicbryan
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.

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

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

------
awongh
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)

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
zeckalpha
Google Maps _used to_ do that.

~~~
peterwwillis
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 use
_ful_.

------
brndnmtthws
Needs bike directions.

