Avoid highways
by Giles Turnbull
There’s a new option in Google Maps, allowing you to plan a route that skirts away from motorways. You can choose to stick to the quieter, slower roads. I applaud the thinking behind this.
The added bonus is that you can get an interesting view of how our major roads and minor roads link with our cities. Take a look at these two route maps, showing a hypothetical journey from Liverpool to Folkestone:
On the motorway…
… and off it
The top map shows the route on motorways; the lower one avoids them. Note how the motorway-free route skips *around* Birmingham but dives right through the centre of London. How it diverts south from Liverpool, via the Wirral and North Wales, instead of ploughing eastwards towards Manchester. And how, in Kent, the slower A20 and the faster M20 are intertwined, skipping and diving around and below one another.
I’ve read In Praise of Slow, like to dawdle and generally don’t rush, but sometimes you’ve gotta get there by time X.
Just out of interest, what was the difference in estimated journey time for the two options?
Good question.
4 hours 54 minutes on the motorways.
8 hours 36 minutes on the back roads.
I used to have an old version of Route 66, which was particularly entertaining for several reasons. Firstly, it covered all of Europe, and secondly, it took a genuinely worrying length of time to calculate routes. But thirdly, it allowed one to select ‘bicycle’ as the transport method.
Choosing that option removed motorways from the search tree, and reset all the road speeds. The results were lovely. For starters, ferries were given higher priority than roads, on the grounds that (a.) they achieved a higher average speed, and (b.) there’s always a ferry going when you arrive at the port, right? Right?
A sample voyage from Glasgow to Venice, by bicycle, started off by taking the Stranraer-Larne ferry, then circumnavigating Ireland before heading back from Cork to Swansea. The route eventually reached Venice via some insane number of junctions and several ferries that most likely don’t even permit cycles, in 17 days 4 hours 43 minutes and 7 seconds.
Which always struck me as perhaps a tad overly-precise, you know?