Help with Google or other maps

[Dave Lehnert]

I looked at Google maps but did not see what I need.

I need to somehow figure out the most efficient why to make my way through the city hitting 7 different stops in one day. Best way to keep from back tracking.
Would be easy if all the locations were off the highway but they are spread out all over the city off the main roads.

Any help or ideas.

[Dan Hintz]

Enter your beginning/ending points like normal. Look at the remaining 5 stops and decide which one is closest to the beginning. Left-click and drag the route to that new address... this will add a waypoint. Left-click and drag a part of the route between the waypoint and the end address to add another waypoint. Repeat until all seven addresses are locked in. If you want to use specific addresses rather than generic locations, modify them on the address list along the left-hand sid eof the screen.

[Matt Meiser]

If you are looking to optimize the route and tell you the order to make the stop, I don't think its going to do that but once you add all your destinations, Google Maps does let you drag and drop the destinations in the upper left corner to rearrange them.

I did find this: http://findthebestroute.com/RouteFinder.html. It seems way pickier about addresses than Google but I did get it to work for 7 locations.

[Jamie Buxton]

The traveling salesman problem is one of those classical issues in mathematics. It turns out to be one of a class of problems called NP-incomplete. It can be proven that these problems can't be solved. That is, Google can't just compute you a perfect solution. There are logistics-management programs that attempt to help, but they're more a set of heuristic rules than a computed solutions. For you, the best approach is to figure out the order of the stops in the route by looking at them on a map. The human eye can do a pretty darn good job of this sort of thing.

[Dan Hintz]

Jamie,

If bounded, they can be solved (it becomes a binary tree). Plenty of people have solved TSPs using various methods (I particularly like the "bee" method ;)). Google could "solve" the problem within a reasonable accuracy (we're talking about driving, so we don't need to solve within millimeters... within 50' would be fine, several hundred feet would likely be acceptable in all but the most difficult of cases), but they're not going to for multiple reasons (the first being, no one is really asking for it).

[Myk Rian]

Enter your beginning/ending points like normal. Look at the remaining 5 stops and decide which one is closest to the beginning. Left-click and drag the route to that new address... this will add a waypoint.
My Garmin will do the same thing. Pretty handy.

[Jim Koepke]

Another piece of the puzzle is if you will be retuning to your starting point.

We live a dozen miles from town. We only venture in once or twice a week most of the time we plan on making at least two or three stops. Often we make more than five if you throw in lunch, coffee stops and paying some bills.

Often we will go to one stop on the way to the farthest point on the route and work our way back.

jtk