Google Maps Adds Terrific New Route Planning

Google's mapping site now has a great time-saving drag-and-drop feature that makes it easy to customize your trip.

Once you add a starting point and destination and get a route, you can grab any portion of that route and drag it to a different street or highway. It's smooth, easy, and extremely useful if you want to avoid a highway interchange with bad traffic, for example, or plan a leisurely back-road drive.





Before this new feature, you could still map out your own custom route, but you had to do it by manually inserting additional stops along each particular road you wanted to take. Both Google Maps and Yahoo Maps allow you to right-click on the map and choose "Add a Destination" (for Google) or "Drive to here" (Yahoo). The site then adds a waypoint at that location and routes through it.

As an example of how this works on Yahoo, I had the site give me directions from San Francisco to Mariposa, CA. Then, I added waypoints (B and C on the map) to take CA-120 and CA-49 instead of 99 and 140, which is faster but nowhere as near as fun for a motorcycle trip.





Google's new drag-and-drop feature works in much the same way, but makes it much faster and easier. When you drag a section of the route to a new path, the site automatically creates a new waypoint at the appropriate part of the trip. If you want to go back to the default route, you can right-click on the yellow waypoint icon and choose "Remove this destination."

What's more, the route updates on the fly as you drag it across potential paths, so it's easy to see when it falls along your preferred roads. And the waypoints are conveniently named according to the road or highway they fall on (Yahoo uses GPS coordinates, which aren't nearly as user-friendly).

I'm sure I'll use this feature often to plan future road trips. Google also suggests using it in combination with its traffic monitoring map option to avoid bottlenecks.

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