Around here (Greater Boston) when the highway going through the city (I-93) gets bad, all the alternate routes are choked very quickly with vehicles routed there by GPS and some kind of equilibrium is reached where the local routes are worse than staying on the highway.
I have been routed to more and more convoluted routes as gridlock spreads from interstate, to arterial to local to neighborhood very quickly.
So staying on the highway might be the best option after all. No way to know unfortunately.
A classmate of mine (almost 25 years ago now) was testing exactly this and found that the elevation changes on I-70 between Manhattan KS and the Colorado state line made less than 1000 feet of difference over 300 miles of roadway. He had originally predicted that it would be less than the width of I-70, so he was off by a factor of 10
He went on to work for a GPS company. Combined his love for geography and IT very nicely.
I’d be doxxing myself if he were reading this but he’s shuffled off this mortal coil, joined the choir invisible.
I’m not clear what your numbers mean, there. If it’s 1000 feet of elevation change over that distance, then the difference in route length would be about four inches. If it’s 1000 feet of difference in route length, then that would require elevation changes of 10.7 miles. The first one doesn’t match your numbers, and the second seems wildly implausible.
I was a Business major. I couldn’t check his math.
Yes, he was saying the horizontal distance along an assumed smooth surface of the earth and the distance accounting for the surface not being smooth was 1000 feet.
The NET elevation change was only about 1000 feet (coincidentally). But the road goes up and down, up and down over the 300 miles. Doesn’t that matter? I’ve driven this route BTW, there are no big hills (or even small hills) but it’s not by any stretch a smooth incline of 1000 feet over 300 miles.
That’s why I said “implausible”, not “impossible”. You could, in principle, get that by going up and down many times. But this is in Kansas, a state notorious for its flatness.
It depends on how you share it. I clicked on your photo, which took me to the shared Google Photo page, then clicked on the photo on that page to show the full photo, then right-clicked that full photo and chose “copy image link”, and posted that, which is different than the link you posted.
Make sure you’re posting a link to the image itself, and not to a page that has the image on it.
I think it must do so based on your current/actual speed.
Some years back, I paid fairly close attention to estimated arrival time on a long highway drive. Despite consistently doing about 10 MPH over the speed limit, my estimated arrival time changed by a minute or two at most.
Same with the DC metro area. Driving south from here, I-95 is the main route. US 1 is literally the only alternative; local roads will not carry you all that far before petering out or dumping you back onto one of the two highways - and there is a river about 40 miles south that is a bottleneck (the only “local” road that crosses it can only be reached by, well, US1 or I-95).
My husband and I differ in whether to bail off the highway onto US1. He tends to bail, I tend to stay put. Each is its own exercise in misery.
If you are on a computer web browser, right-click the photo and choose to copy the image link, and post that, which is what I have below. If you are on a mobile browser that isn’t an option, but to get the same link you should be able to tap-and-hold the image, which should give you the option to copy the image. Then paste into the address field of the browser, which should give you that same link.
It’s obviously easier to do on a computer, but that’s generally the case with anything.
Is it? I do not doubt your experience with this but I mean, A^2 + B^2 = C^2
Make it simple with a classic 3, 4, 5 right-triangle. On a flat pane A & C are three units apart. But when at altitude (height B) the distance is now 5 units. That’s 40% more than distance length-A.
That’s the basic issue; humans tend to be pretty bad at recognizing real-world slopes.
Think about what would be a really steep road slope; say, a 20% grade. That would feel terrible to drive, but that means that for every 100 feet of horizontal travel, you are changing elevation by 20 feet.
100^2 + 20^2 = 10400
√10400 = 101.98
So even at that ‘extreme’ slope, you’ve only got a change of 2%…
I’ve been wanting to start a thread about Google maps, but in the end didn’t think it was worth a whole thread so… I hope it’s not a hijack to piggy-back here.
I enter coordinates into google a lot in this format: N 34° 53.872 W 120° 26.456
And they stayed that way. Now when I enter those coordinates and hit ‘enter’, it converts them to this format: 34°53’52.3"N 120°26’27.4"W , which I don’t want.
Is this a new default setting? Is it possible to change so it stays in the format I enter?
Is there a reason you want it to stay in degrees-decimal minutes rather than degrees-minutes-seconds (out of curiosity, and to maybe suggest other options)?
It wasn’t using your actual speed; it was using the typical speed for drivers in general on that road. You just happened to be going at about the same speed that everyone else does there. If it used your actual instantaneous speed, then it would be horribly wrong for any trip that was part freeway, part local roads.
Sorta. If it was aware I’m going 20% faster than typical or 20% faster than the cars around me right here right now it’d be able to assume I would keep doing 20% better than the folks who will later be around me the whole way to my destination.
Does it really make a difference? I’m not sure why it would, but maybe there’s something I’m not thinking of.
I have a hobby that sometimes involves recording the location of somewhere so I can go back at a later time. I get such a location from GoogleMap’s URL, which has the lat-long in decimal degrees to 6 or 7 digits to the right of the decimal point. (Actually only 4 or 5 digits are needed, but having more does not hurt.) So I save that lat-long and at a later time, copy-paste it back into GoogleMap’s search field. Yes, it does convert that to the format you give, but it still takes me to the location I’m interested in. So it doesn’t bother me that it does that.
I have another question about Google Maps that I just noticed today. Until today, if you went on Google Maps and clicked the name of a city, town, or CDP, you got the city limits or boundary of the area along with temperature and weather. Now, you don’t get the temperature and weather anymore. Is that the case with everyone else or is the problem with my browser?
Yes it makes a difference. I am involved in a geo-location hobby. I occasionally have a need to hone in on a location on google maps by ‘walking’ coordinates over, fine-tuning as I go. The website associated with this hobby only accepts that format. It used to be easy, now it’s a PITA.
