Advanced Route Planner for Car Travelers

Craft your perfect Aussie adventure with our free route planner. Discover uncharted routes, blend entertainment with exploration, and tap into a wealth of travel wisdom for a seamless journey.

This distance calculator, spanning Australia and beyond, simplifies planning your journeys. Enter starting and destination points in the "From" and "To" fields, accepting city names, addresses, or GPS coordinates. Click the crosshair icon to pick locations directly on the map. Press "Calculate" to proceed.

Tailor your trip with "Fuel consumption" and "Fuel price" fields to estimate fuel costs accurately. For a customized route, use "Advanced options" to add stops or adjust speed settings, ensuring your travel is just as you like it, whether you're in a hurry or prefer a leisurely pace.

Routes Between Cities in Australia

What Can You Do With This Route Planner

Check
route for optimality
Save
fuel and travel costs
Calculate
route metrics
Plan
departure and arrival times

How Is the Distance Between Cities and Points Calculated?

Distance and Travel Time Calculation Algorithm

This calculator utilizes shortest path search algorithms within a weighted road graph, including Dijkstra, A-Star, and Contraction Hierarchies. Unlike other calculators that typically use either distance or travel time as graph weights, this tool optimizes for drive time with a preference for higher-class roads, factoring in road priority.

The road graph is built using OpenStreetMap data, calculating distances between road segments from their precise GPS coordinates with the haversine formula, which measures the "air distance" or straight line distance between points. Since road distances deviate from straight line distances due to curves and directional changes, the tool models the road as a series of straight segments. For each segment, the haversine formula is applied, allowing accurate calculation of road distances.

Recognizing that cities span more than a single point, the tool selects central points within cities to calculate distances. Routes can be personalized to start or end outside city centers by inputting specific addresses or choosing points on a map. Additionally, users have the flexibility to adjust the start and end points directly on the map.

Travel time is estimated by segmenting the route and assessing the maximum speed limit on each segment. This information helps calculate the fastest possible travel time for the journey.

It's important to note that route calculations are based on computer models, which aren't flawless. Planning should include allowances for potential inaccuracies.

Other Methods of Calculating Distances

Opening a highway atlas and manually plotting a route offers a straightforward method for estimating distances. Rolling a curvimeter along your chosen path allows you to gauge approximate mileage. For time estimations, consider an average speed of 80 km/h on main intercity roads. Though these figures are rough, their simplicity is a clear benefit.

In the absence of a curvimeter, a ruler makes a good substitute. Starting with the ruler's zero point at the beginning of your route, trace along, closely following the road's twists and turns. Then, translate this measurement into kilometers or miles based on the map's scale, typically found on each page of the atlas.

Distance between cities can also be determined using tables in atlases and guidebooks, a particularly handy method for journeys between major urban areas. It's worth noting, however, that these tables often exclude smaller towns.

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