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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?

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  • Where do you want to make stops? Do you want to divide the 26 hours into equal segments (e.g. to switch between 3 drivers) or do you want to go to some place to sleep (a hotel / motel / etc.)?
    – JJJ
    Commented Jan 10, 2019 at 3:02
  • @JJJ I want to plan to make stops. But I want to be able to balance the drive legs so that my stops don't end up in either the middle of nowhere or the middle of a humongous city - which will require some interactive tweaking.
    – Peter M
    Commented Jan 10, 2019 at 3:05
  • If your on the interstate there are plenty of rest stops to use the bathroom. If your just traveling to go from point A to B then most likely your gas gauge will determine when you stop. Fuel consumption is kind of tricky to plan for (hills, traffic tie ups, 80mph speeds on some roads). It would be best to play it by gauge after you have your route picked. If your in the west don't let your gas gauge get bellow 1/2 full. Towns are far apart.
    – gamma_sponge
    Commented Jan 10, 2019 at 15:40
  • @PeterM I can't see a problem with the viamichelin-website. You can add a lot of information there, but it's optional and not required
    – Dirty-flow
    Commented Jan 5, 2021 at 14:38

2 Answers 2

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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:

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:

Bangor, ME to blank to Miami, FL

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:

Bangor, ME to Richmond, VA to Miami, FL

Here, if I click Details, it will show me separate travel times for each segment.

Directions details

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.

Drag waypoint to change route

It's not perfect, but perhaps it's good enough?

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  • I know that I can do that (it was also referenced in that other question) I'm looking for something more visual and more interactive.
    – Peter M
    Commented Jan 10, 2019 at 3:39
  • Once you have the waypoint showing on the map, you can drag it around.
    – Michael Hampton
    Commented Jan 10, 2019 at 3:41
  • And I have to keep gleaning the data from the details.
    – Peter M
    Commented Jan 10, 2019 at 3:42
  • Like I said, it's not exactly what you want, as you do have to do lots of extra clicking to get the info you want to see, but I don't think anything better exists right now.
    – Michael Hampton
    Commented Jan 10, 2019 at 3:44
  • That was the question - does anything better exist? What you are suggesting is already mentioned in my question as what I don't want to do.
    – Peter M
    Commented Jan 10, 2019 at 3:46
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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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  • This is definitely better than google for what I want (as the segment times are more apparent), but still much the same :(
    – Peter M
    Commented Jan 10, 2019 at 12:29
  • Added an edit with another tool, that might fit the requirement better.
    – dunni
    Commented Aug 1, 2019 at 18:52

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