Driving directions

[Dirk_Walks]

I submitted my first cache last night, and noticed that the driving directions ignore my suggested free parking spot. They point to an entirely inappropriate street half a mile away which has strict parking controls (some bits resident-only, other parking meters. If the person hiding the cache is trusted to give directions to it in the first place, it would make sense to allow their suggested parking spot to influence the driving directions.

[+palmetto]

I agree, it would be pleasant if the driving directions were to parking.

That said, most let their gps devices navigate while actually out driving around. Hopefully, they'll realize that they should load the PARKING.

 

My player account owns a cache with this in a log, "After driving around a bit, we thought of this extremely awesome idea - putting the parking coords into the GPSr! Then we found it pretty quickly...".

Edited March 22, 2016 by palmetto

[+T.D.M.22]

I submitted my first cache last night, and noticed that the driving directions ignore my suggested free parking spot. They point to an entirely inappropriate street half a mile away which has strict parking controls (some bits resident-only, other parking meters. If the person hiding the cache is trusted to give directions to it in the first place, it would make sense to allow their suggested parking spot to influence the driving directions.

 

Your suggested parking would be an additional waypoint.

 

You don't get to choose driving directions, as they're different for different for different people dependi g on where they start.

[+MartyBartfast]

I submitted my first cache last night, and noticed that the driving directions ignore my suggested free parking spot. They point to an entirely inappropriate street half a mile away which has strict parking controls (some bits resident-only, other parking meters. If the person hiding the cache is trusted to give directions to it in the first place, it would make sense to allow their suggested parking spot to influence the driving directions.

 

Your suggested parking would be an additional waypoint.

 

You don't get to choose driving directions, as they're different for different for different people dependi g on where they start.

 

On each cache page there's a "Driving Directions" button, which uses Google routing to provide directions to the cache co-ords, which may be in the middle of a field/wood/lake, I think the suggestion in the OP is that if a parking waypoint has been provided then the Driving Directions should be to the parking waypoint rather than the cache co-ords. However that could be complicated by the fact that it's possible to add multiple parking waypoints to a cache, so how would the routing know which one to use?

[+HHL]

[...] However that could be complicated by the fact that it's possible to add multiple parking waypoints to a cache, so how would the routing know which one to use?

 

Anyone of several parking waypoints is a much better routing solution than routing into the middle of nowhere.

 

Hans

[+Gill & Tony]

Maybe the CO could put the default parking spot first so default routing would go there. If the driver wanted to use one of the others then they could choose it.

[jri]

It annoyed me too that the driving directions at the top of the cache pages ignore any Parking Area waypoint. I built a workaround into my Geocaching Map Enhancements Greasemonkey script.

 

With GME, you get an extra Parking icon to the right of the waypoint details. The link at the top of the page still gives you directions to the cache location (which may be unhelpful), but the icons by each Parking Area or Trailhead waypoint give you the Google directions from your home coordinates to that waypoint. If there's more than one Parking Area or Trailhead waypoint, each one gets its own directions icon.

 

If you're not using a script, it's rather tedious to have to edit the driving directions link by hand, or manually enter the parking waypoint into Google Maps to get directions. It may not be high on their priorities list, but as all the necessary information to do this is already on the cache pages at the moment, I would have thought that Groundspeak could implement directions links for waypoints without taking much extra load on their servers.