I spent 2000 hours building a tool that makes your Google Maps routes even faster (and more efficient) as you travel through Europe
I spent 2000 hours building a tool that makes your Google Maps routes even faster (and more efficient) as you travel through Europe
3 comments
For context, this extension reorders the stops in a multi-stop route to give you the most efficient route (*Traveling Salesman Problem* if you’ve heard of it).
It basically tells u what stops you should go to in what order to ensure you spend the least amount of **time** and **petrol** on the road. Hope that helps and let me know if theres any features I could add. All feedback is welcome:)
Gave it a try and it’s very cool.
I almost never use Google Maps anymore for planning these types of trips though. They used to have like a 25-stop limit to locations, but now it’s just 10 places, which isn’t useful when I’m planning a travel itinerary for a day and plan to see 10 churches, 3 castles, 2 restaurants, 3 museums, 2 bakeries, etc.
I’ve been using [Sygic Travel](https://travel.sygic.com/en) from the Czech Republic for the past 5 years and really like it. It doesn’t use Google Maps, but you just press the location on the map, click add, then it autosorts to give you an optimized itinerary (like yours does) and spits out the route on your phone (and tracks your movement so you know you’re on the path).
I think your biggest issue is being cost competitive. I paid $7.99 one-time for Sygic Premium in perpetuity (I think it’s $9.99 now), so $19.99/month is an entire tier higher in cost (people trying to save on petrol aren’t spending $250 a year on an app subscription). You’ll need to find a way to cleave that down since the product is great, but cost is not competitive. Just my two cents. Best of luck!
Tried it out for my route today and it ended up rearranging my stops into a route that’s 6km longer (36km instead of 30km) and takes the same amount of time in current traffic. Looks cool, but it might need a little more tweaking.