Advanced Route Planner for Car Travellers
Craft your perfect road trip with our free route planner. Discover new routes, enjoy seamless travel planning, and embark on adventures with ease and excitement.
This distance calculator, covering Great Britain, Europe, and worldwide, is your go-to tool for planning routes efficiently. Simply enter your starting point and destination in the "From" and "To" fields, which accept city names, addresses, or GPS coordinates. Clicking the crosshair icon allows you to pinpoint locations on the map directly. After inputting your details, press "Calculate" to see your route.
Utilize the "Fuel consumption" and "Fuel price" fields for an accurate estimate of your journey's fuel costs. For a tailored travel experience, explore the "Advanced options" to include stops or adjust speeds, ensuring your drive is perfectly aligned with your preferences.
Routes Between Cities in Great Britain
What Can You Do with This Route Planner
- Family Holiday Planning: Families can utilise the distance calculator for orchestrating summer holiday journeys by car. It enables the estimation of total travel distance, facilitating budget planning through the calculation of fuel expenses, based on the vehicle's fuel consumption and the prevailing average fuel price per litre.
- Business Travel Organisation: Professionals planning car trips for business purposes can benefit from this tool by identifying the most efficient routes, thereby optimising travel schedules and estimating travel expenditures, including fuel costs.
- Logistics and Freight Management: For logistics companies and freight forwarders, the distance calculator is indispensable for mapping out routes, calculating distances between cities, and estimating transportation costs in line with company tariffs, thus enhancing the accuracy of freight quotations.
- Coordinating Midpoint Meetings: The tool also proves valuable for friends planning meetups, allowing them to calculate a halfway point between different cities, making it simpler to arrange gatherings that are convenient for all parties involved.
How Is the Distance Between Cities and Points Calculated?
Distance and Travel Time Calculation Algorithm
This calculator determines routes using shortest path search algorithms within a weighted road graph, employing algorithms such as Dijkstra, A-Star, and Contraction Hierarchies. Unlike other calculators that prioritize distance or travel time, this tool optimizes drive time for cars, favoring routes along higher-class roads.
The road graph is built from OpenStreetMap data, with road segment distances calculated using the haversine formula, based on exact GPS coordinates. This approach calculates "air distance," which differs from road distance due to roads having curves and varying directions. The road is modeled as a series of straight segments, for each of which the haversine formula is applied, allowing for accurate road distance calculations between any two points.
Cities are not single points but span large areas. Thus, the calculator selects central points within cities for distance calculations. Routes can be customized away from city centers by entering specific addresses or selecting points on a map, with the option to adjust the route's start and end points directly on the map.
Travel time calculations break the route into segments, assessing the maximum speed allowed on each to estimate the quickest possible journey time.
It is important to remember that route calculations are based on computer models, which are not infallible. Always plan with contingencies in mind.
Other Methods of Calculating Distances
One straightforward method to calculate distances involves using a highway atlas to visually plot a route. By utilising a curvimeter along this plotted route, one can obtain an estimated distance. For time estimation, it's common to consider an average speed of 80 km/h on major intercity roads. Though these estimates may be approximate, their simplicity is a key advantage.
Should a curvimeter be unavailable, a ruler can be a practical alternative. Begin by aligning the ruler's zero mark with the starting point of your route, carefully navigating it along the road's contours. The measured length can then be converted into kilometres or miles, in accordance with the atlas's map scale, which is typically indicated on each page.
Distance between cities can also be determined through tables found in atlases and guidebooks, offering convenience for journeys that begin and end in major urban areas. However, it's worth noting that these tables often exclude smaller towns.