To get good driving directions you need a good street database and a good destination!
You can get the latitude and longitude for an address with this tip on how to geocoder an address with Google Maps. But you can also use that same trick to get the lat,lng for any location. Just scroll around in the map, and double click on the point you want.
Now what? Google maps lets you look up things other than street addresses, and you can get driving directions to almost anything you can look up. We wrote about this in Google Maps Hacks, so I guess even though it is five years old the book is not entirely useless :-)
Some examples you can enter into the Google Maps search bar:
SFO (an airport code)
954305 (zip code)
38.435514,-122.788203 (latitude and longitude)
And you can also get street directions to these places. For example:
"241 Florence Ave, Sebastopol, CA to 38.435514,-122.788203 "
What if you are trying to give someone else directions, but you don't like the directions which
Google gives you? This is pretty common! It was only very recently that Google presented directions to Sebastopol which made sense. Before the directions sent you on a strange detour!
The funny thing is that O'Reilly Media, the premier computer book publisher and home of Make Magazine, is in Sebastopol. If anywhere would have a chance of improved directions you'd think it would be us! (Though maybe the Google guys just fly in by helicopter and don't need road directions :-)
You can create a custom route in Google Maps. Do your normal search:
"SFO to LAX" for example. Once the route is displayed you can click and drag the route to
go wherever you want. And then click on the ''link" button for a URL. You can then give people that URL and they will show you the same routing as you selected.
Or you can type a multi-route direction directly into Google Maps by separating each place with a ':' for example:
'from:20 Rainsville Road, Petaluma, CA 94952-8121 to:NAPA, CA to:SFO'
Hello,
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure where to post this but I have an issue with Geocoder.
I've installed Geocoder but when I run my application, I receive the error;
Fatal error: Class 'Buzz\Browser' not found in D:\xampp\htdocs\dmp\geocoder\src\Geocoder\HttpAdapter\BuzzHttpAdapter.php on line 31
Line 31:
$this->browser = new Browser();
Would you know a solution to this problem, or point to a forum where I can discuss this?
The improvement and the up gradation of the geocoder have made people to locate the places exactly and also the shortest path to reach the destination.
ReplyDelete