This was a fun week's worth of work for Team TeachStreet. Felt good to get everybody working on a single project (we've spent many months working on lots of different areas of the site, and working with different partners). It was really refreshing, and you could almost 'feel' morale climb, as we all had a chance to just have fun for a few days!
As a lover of road trips, I really dig what you're doing.
If I may offer two observations:
1) I would appreciate some sort of filter to hide multi-location stops like Sub-way, Exxon, etc. If you are going to have such data at all, I would appreciate the ability to hide it. I can find a gas station by reading the highway signs, but it's not as easy to find the super unique and interesting stops.
2) Scaling the page to see more of the map makes the text very difficult to read.
Anyways, pretty darn good for a week. Thanks for sharing!
Hmmm. Well, the "places of interest" it suggested to me didn't look interesting, but it's nearly useful. What it really needs is just to have a "time" column estimating how far each stop is from the last one.
Maybe I just grew up watching too many NSW RTA ads, but I'm a firm believer in the principle that for safety you should stop and get out of the car every two hours. So if it could suggest stops which were spaced roughly two hours apart, it'd be useful to me.
That's funny you say that. The "time" situation was something we struggled with to find what the best experience would be. The questions we had were:
- Do you stop 1 hour all the time when you stop at a restaurant? What if you take it to-go?
- What if you stop at a stop like the World's Largest Frying Pan for just 5 minutes? Should we allow users to add custom time limits for each of the stops?
- Would we be complicating things adding custom times?
All great questions and things for us to think about. Thanks a ton for the feedback.
I'd only want an estimate of the travel times between destinations, not an estimate of how long I'd actually spend stopped at each (which I wouldn't attempt to estimate in advance anyway).
For me the use case is this: I want to drive from (say) San Francisco to Denver, and want to plan out a schedule which involves stopping every two hours for a break.
great suggestion Hugh. We definitely want to incorporate the time of day and time between stops at some point, both for the reason you suggested as well as to be smarter about the types of attractions we suggest at different times. thanks!
Cool idea, but I'm not driving 10 miles out of the way to get to KFC/Taco Bell.
I don't think this should feature restaurants but rather "things to do", hiking trails, look outs, maybe specific food places (local legends, etc) but specifically things that "make up communities" (I think of like college football towns, etc)
Totally agree. Our first pass was to pull in location information from Google Places and Foursquare, but we feel the beauty of something like this would be the unique locations like you mentioned above.
Very nice project! And this is the kind of thing I always want to do: stop at weird little fun places on the way. I wish I had it when I did a cross-country trip. Looks like I had missed a few scenic drives and what not!
FYI, when there are multiple possible routes (e.g. the second when going from Dallas, TX to Surprise, AZ) and you choose one that isn't the default, the "Featured Stops" still show for the default.
I'm actually getting that error 100% of the time. I tested Seattle to Redmond, and then I tested a specific address to another specific address, both in Belltown.
hey zach, we just fixed the bug. just tried both seattle to redmond and seattle to yakima -- worked all the way through. let me know if there's any issues on your end still. thanks!
@porfirio: Thanks a lot for trying it out. We're currently pulling in data from various sources like Foursquare, Google Places, etc. -- but we do add unique stops as well. Currently we've filled out unique stops for the PNW (since we're based here), but CA is definitely one we'd like to tackle soon.
