Welcome! Click on the map to begin.

Step 3. Begin building your route by clicking subsequent locations. The Statistics legend will update to reflect the distance traveled in your new route.

Step 2. Click on the map where your route begins. A marker will appear indicating that this is the starting point.

Step 1. Navigate to the beginning of your route by entering its location in the search bar or by positioning the map to it.

RouteBuilder FAQ

How can I support RouteBuilder?

Share routebuilder on Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, etc)

Create a route for an upcoming event and share it with the event organizers

Donate via the "Paypal Tip Jar" link.

What's this website all about?

RouteBuilder is a handy way to draw up custom routes on a map and share them with friends. Some people find it to be a useful tool to calculate the distance they walked during their lunch break or weekend hiking trip. Others use RouteBuilder to map out planned bicycle excursions so that they can send the route to friends via email.

How long will my routes be valid?

There are no guarantees, however all routes created in the last eight years are still accessible. We intend to keep it that way.

How many waypoints can be saved in one route?

500. After 500 points, web browsers have a hard time rendering all the data.

How come if I click on two points along a curvy road, the line doesn't follow the curvature of the road?

Two reasons. First, Google doesn't provide an interface to the road data, so I have no way of knowing if you clicked on a road or not, nor do I know where the road twists and turns.

Second, many people create routes that go off-road (e.g. to plot a hiking path). These people wouldn't want RouteBuilder to follow along a road anyway.

Can RouteBuilder give me turn by turn directions based on the route I plot out?

No, but wouldn't that be cool!!

How are the waypoints saved?

The waypoints in your route get stored in a MySQL database. The alphanumeric string at the end of the URL generated from "Save Route" is the unique ID for your route. I intentionally made the URL as short as I could so that routes could easily be shared with friends.

What languages/tools did you use to make RouteBuilder?

Google Maps API, Yahoo Geocode Service, AJAX, Apache, mod_rewrite, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, HTML and XML.