Road distance

Dear all,
Is there a way of computing the *road* distance (i.e., the distance
that you would travel if you were to use the road network) between two
GPS coordinates automatically (e.g., from Python using)?
Cheers,
Luis

On Mon, 10 May 2010 08:03:23 -0700 (PDT), Luis Quesada


You can do that with Google Maps.

Happy Trails wrote:

Indeed, but I don't want to introduce all those queries manually!
Let me quote the answer that I got from Alex Ezell in another mailing
list (in case somebody is interested):

======================================================================
Hi Luis,
I've not done it in Python directly, but I have done it using the
Directions API (AJAX) that Google Maps provides. You basically are
asking for directions between the two points, but what you really care
about is the distance value that the API returns.

Would that work for you?

Alex
======================================================================

Cheers,
Luis

Of course you can access Gmaps API from python and do the queries
automatically.
You need an API key (free, after registration). The free key has some
limitations in terms of number of queries.

I did a similar thing using google maps API to do some reverse
geocoding.
You may also have a look a geopy.

I'm interested, if you want we can share infos/code. (I did my project
for personal use...)

Luis Quesada wrote:



use some maps, use

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm

a nice job ;-)


Pay the copy rights to the Greek, they forgot to take patents on
mathematics!


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