Routes Planner – Interesting Features

What is a routes planner? How to properly use one? What are the major features a good routes planner should have? If you are looking for an answer to any of these questions or to anything else related to routes planners, the chances are you came to the right place.

A routes planner is a computer software intended to assist people planning an optimal route from one geographical location to another. It is usually specialized to do the route planning based on the road network and thus becoming a road routes planner. Such an application is fairly easy to use and it does not imply any special knowledge. Anyway, a good sense of orientation is always an advantage for the person using the application and from time to time local knowledge of the area is needed.

There are a couple of websites that offer route planning services online. A personal favorite is ViaMichelin, offering some neat features. Other routes planners worth mentioning here are RAC Route planner, Google Maps and Mapquest. Let’s see now which features I really like to see implemented in a routes planner application. First on my list is to let me optimize the route depending on what vehicle I am using. For example if I am planning for a bicycle journey, the routes planner will automatically optimize the route accordingly, avoiding motorways. A small inconvenience when optimizing for bicycle in some route planners that you might encounter is a limit the journey cannot exceed, for instance 150 miles.

Another really great feature that any decent routes planner should have is the ability to add stages to your route. Let’s say you want to travel from London to Berlin, but you want to spend a day in Paris. All you have to do is adding Paris as a stage to your route. Now another nice feature related to our example would be to have the possibility to look for a hotel and/or a restaurant in a specific area.

An important feature that should not be missing from a routes planner is to provide you with precise, detailed and updated information about the costs, time and distance of your journey. The costs should contain both toll and fuel costs. A valuable adjacent feature is to offer you the option to optimize your route depending on your necessities: quickest, shortest or economical for instance. 

There are of course other interesting and useful features a routes planner might provide, but we will let you discover those and find for yourself the routes planner of your choice. Visit http://www.route-master.com/ and learn more about this topic.