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Plan a driving, walking, bicycling, or public-transit route between any two addresses or GPS coordinates.
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Last checked June 3, 2026
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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. A 5 to 15% difference between them is normal. For a long trip, that is half an hour of disagreement.
When the embed gives up
The Google Maps embed used here is a lightweight version of the full Maps app. It handles one origin and one destination cleanly, and it shows traffic-adjusted ETAs. What it does not do is multi-stop routes, offline downloads, or step-by-step navigation. For any of those, the Open in Google Maps button hands the same route off to the full app on your device.