How to use it
- Type the start and the destination, or use your location, or click the map.
- Choose drive, cycle or walk. The route is drawn and the distance and time appear.
- Drag either pin to change the trip. Press Swap to reverse it.
- Copy the link to share the route.
5 practical uses
- Plan a road trip leg and the fuel it needs.
- Check the drive to a job site, a client or a venue before quoting.
- Compare a drive with a cycle or a walk for the same trip.
- Estimate delivery times between a depot and a customer.
- Find how much a route detours around water or mountains.
The maths behind it
The engine finds the fastest route with an A* search over the road graph, where each road segment costs its length divided by the speed the engine assigns to that road type, plus turn and junction penalties. The distance is the sum of the segment lengths of that route; the straight line is the haversine distance; the detour factor is their ratio.
Reading the result
The road distance is the length of the route the engine finds, which is the fastest, not always the shortest. The time uses typical speeds for each road type with no live traffic, so it is a fair-weather, quiet-road estimate. The straight line is the great-circle distance, and the detour factor is the road distance divided by it: 1.2 to 1.4 is normal; higher means water, mountains or a sparse road network in the way.
Where the routes come from
Routes come from Valhalla, an open routing engine on OpenStreetMap data run by FOSSGIS, the German OpenStreetMap association. It is a public, best-effort service: it can be slow at busy times, and a route through a badly mapped area is only as good as the map. Nothing else about you is sent with the request.
For several stops in a row see the multi-stop distance; for the effect of one extra stop, the detour calculator.