does anything generate the most efficient multi-stop driving route?

May 29, 2019 3:41 PM

I need to go to about thirty places, which are all in the same county but scattered all over the place. Is there an app or something where I can put in all these addresses and be told the most efficient driving route for visiting all of them in one trip? Apparently Google maps won’t unless I enter them in order. Thanks!
posted by centrifugal to Travel & Transportation (8 answers total)

Best answer: https://www.mapquest.com/routeplanner
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:43 PM on May 29, 2019 [8 favorites]

FYI, this is called the "Travelling salesman problem" and it's really surprisingly hard to solve (and that's not even taking into account like... traffic and whatnot).
posted by brainmouse at 3:50 PM on May 29, 2019 [25 favorites]

Best answer: I've used RouteXL a LOT and I love it!
posted by cooker girl at 4:35 PM on May 29, 2019 [1 favorite]

It's considered a hard problem because its difficulty snowballs as the number of cities gets large. But the task the OP is looking at isn't large enough for that to be a problem.

Your link describes several algorithms that would work for 30 cities in reasonable time. It looks like the MapQuest route planner tops out at 26. But it isn't unreasonable to hope that someone else would have a version that goes to/past 30.
posted by nebulawindphone at 4:35 PM on May 29, 2019 [2 favorites]

Maybe try it with a subset of the stops, in the largest towns with the best highway access?

A few detours off of faster roads has to be more efficient than having Mapquest route you on backroads all the way around.
posted by JoeZydeco at 5:30 PM on May 29, 2019 [1 favorite]

I've done this with Google before, typed in all the addresses, then manually dragged and dropped them up or down. It might not have given me the route that was actually most efficient, but it did take into consideration my preferences and took probably 1 minute to do by just visually looking at the map and creating a circuit. Y(literal)MMV.
posted by papayaninja at 7:34 PM on May 29, 2019 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Okay, I really never expected that the words “look at this amazing thing Mapquest can do” would come out of my mouth, but this has now happened. You can choose the shorter route or the faster one and, at least in my area, choosing faster means mostly highways. I’ve ignored Mapquest since it always suggested making the wrong turn from my parents’ driveway in the nineties, but that tool is going to make my job much easier. Thank you!
posted by centrifugal at 10:14 PM on May 29, 2019 [4 favorites]

Not sure if MapQuest recommends this, but maybe you should traverse the tour clockwise, in order to make more right turns than left.
posted by JimDe at 12:15 PM on May 30, 2019 [1 favorite]