Road trip distance/driving time planning
I am planning a cross country, point-to-point road trip that will total about 26 hours of driving. The purpose of this trip is not sight seeing, but just to get from point A to point B.
I can plug my start and finish destinations into google and get a nice map with the shortest route and the total drive time duration. But for better planning of breaks along the way etc what would really help is to be able to see how the accumulated drive time varies across the span of the trip. EG what I want is something like one of these:
See ticks or coloration along the route that indicate (say for example) 1, 2, 4 or 8 hours of drive time.
Drop pins on the route (that I can move around) and directly see the drive time duration between them
Specify the number of hours driving per leg that I want to endure.
As per the comment on this question from 2015 I could manually set waypoints in google maps and then read through the detailed directions in order to glean the durations between said waypoints. But that seems so 4 years ago (and a lot of work - especially as it is very easy to add a waypoint that isn't on the direct route). And I looked at the Michelin web site in the answer and that seems to want a whole lot of information from me that I was not prepared to share.
Is there a better alternative in 2019?
Best Answer
You can sort of do this in Google Maps now, though it's probably not quite as automatic as you might like.
Consider this 26 hour drive from Bangor, ME to Miami, FL:
To add a waypoint, I'm going to click the ?, and then drag the new waypoint to the center of the list:
Then I click in the text field, and either type in a city or click on the map. Here, I will guess the halfway point and type in Richmond, VA and press Enter. I first thought of Washington, but it's probably the sort of big city you'd rather drive through than stop in. I end up with this three point set of directions:
Here, if I click Details, it will show me separate travel times for each segment.
Once you have a waypoint, you can drag it around to change your route, and click Details again to see the new travel routes and times.
It's not perfect, but perhaps it's good enough?
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Most people should drive between 8 and 12 hours per day on a road trip. You may decide to stop every 2 or 3 hours to stretch and get more gas. You may need to drive 12 hours if you have a short travel schedule. However, if you get drowsy or stiff while driving, you should strive to only drive up to 8 hours per day.How much time should you add to a road trip?
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You can use Google Maps as a trip planner through the "Places" and "My Maps" features. Both the Google Maps website and app let you save locations to lists, which you can then get immediate directions to. When getting directions, you can look up reviews and add multiple stops to your route.How To Plan A Long-Distance Trip By Electric Car
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Answer 2
Also maybe not a perfect solution for your usecase, but maybe better than Google Maps: https://roadtrippers.com/ This allows you to create a route and add intermediate stops on an interactive map. The downside is (since that tool is mainly targeting sightseeing road trips), that you have to select POIs for your stops, like restaurants, hotels etc. You cannot just put a marker on any arbitrary location. But it at least shows directly the times and distances for each sub segment in the trip overview.
Another tool which i used to plan my last roadtrip: https://trips.furkot.com/
It can split the tour into daily chunks, with suggestions where to stay overnight so that it fits the plan etc.
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