Get directions — free driving directions route planner

How to get directions between two places

1. Type the starting point and the destination: an address, a landmark, or coordinates in any format. Or tap Use my location for the start.
2. Choose driving, walking, bicycling, or public transit.
3. Tap Get directions. Both places appear on the map with the straight-line distance between them, so you can check they are the places you meant.
4. Tap Open route in Google Maps for the road route, its distance and travel time with current traffic, and turn-by-turn directions, on the web or in the app.

Place names are looked up with OpenStreetMap’s free geocoder for the preview, which allows one request per second, so the two lookups take a moment. Google Maps receives your original text (or your coordinates) and finds the places itself.

Why the suggested route is not always the shortest

Routing engines do not optimise for distance. They optimise for time. Two routes between the same pair of points can differ wildly because the longer one might be a motorway with steady traffic while the shorter one cuts through residential streets with traffic lights every two hundred meters. The engine looks at the road graph, the historical speed on each segment at this hour of the day, and the current real-time traffic from millions of phones, and picks whichever combination produces the lowest predicted arrival time.

This is also why the route can change between two attempts a few minutes apart. A crash on the motorway gets reported, the predicted speed for that segment drops, and the engine reroutes everyone through the longer-looking detour that is now faster.

Walking, biking, and transit use different graphs

Picking a different travel mode is not just a slower version of the same route. Walking directions include pedestrian-only streets, staircases, and pedestrian crossings that a driving route cannot use. Biking directions know about bike lanes where they have been mapped, and avoid motorways. Transit directions read schedules — they will tell you to walk seven minutes to a bus stop, ride for nineteen minutes, and walk three minutes at the other end, with the timings tied to the next scheduled departure.

Transit coverage is the unevenest of the four. London, Tokyo, and New York have minute-by-minute schedules; many smaller cities only have major bus and metro lines mapped, and rural areas often have no transit data at all.

Why two apps quote different arrival times

Open Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Waze at the same time with the same destination, and you will often see three different ETAs. Each app has its own traffic data set, its own preferences (some default to avoiding tolls, some weight motorway speed more aggressively), and its own model for how aggressively a typical driver actually drives. Even Google Maps and Waze, both owned by Google since it bought Waze in 2013, regularly disagree because each app weighs traffic reports and route preferences differently. On a long trip those differences can add up to many minutes, so treat any single ETA as an estimate rather than a promise.

What the full Google Maps app adds

This page sets up a single route from one place to another. Opening it in Google Maps adds everything a real trip needs: alternative routes, live traffic and travel time, extra stops, avoiding tolls, motorways, or ferries, choosing a departure or arrival time for transit, offline maps, and spoken turn-by-turn navigation on your phone. Before you leave, you might also want to preview the destination in Street View to check the entrance, or explore the area around it on the interactive map.

Plan something else

Entering an origin or destination that has no address

Both fields accept coordinates as well as a street address, in decimal degrees, degrees-minutes-seconds, UTM, or as a Google Maps link. That matters more often than it sounds: campsites, trailheads, building site entrances, rural properties on unnamed lanes, and anywhere a friend has sent you a pin rather than a postcode. Paste 29.749907, -95.358421 into either field and Google Maps routes to that exact point.

One caveat worth knowing: routing snaps your coordinate to the nearest routable road. If the point you give is in the middle of a large site, the route ends at whichever road edge is closest as the crow flies — which is not always the correct entrance. For big venues, searching the name usually beats pasting a coordinate, because the map data records the actual vehicle entrance. To read off your own coordinates first, use the My Location tool.

Route distance is not straight-line distance

The distance Google Maps shows for a route is the length of the actual path — every bend, every detour around a river, every one-way system. The distance shown on this page is the straight line between the two places, calculated in your browser on the WGS 84 ellipsoid. The road distance is almost always longer, sometimes dramatically so in mountainous or coastal terrain where the road has to go the long way round.

If what you actually want is the great-circle distance — the “as the crow flies” figure used for flight planning, radio range, geofencing, and delivery-zone rules — the distance calculator computes it directly from two coordinate pairs, with bearings and the midpoint. Comparing the two numbers is a quick sanity check on how indirect a journey really is. Some detour is normal: a 2012 nationwide US study by Boscoe, Henry and Zdeb measured an average road-to-straight-line ratio of about 1.4. A ratio of 2 or more usually means a river, mountain range, or coastline the road has to go around.

Frequently asked questions