Meet in the middle

How to use it

1. 1

   Enter where everyone starts

   Search for an address or a place, type coordinates, use your location or tap the map. Click “Add a third person” if there are three of you.

2. 2

   Say how you’re traveling

   By car, by bike or on foot, everyone the same or each their own way (“Mixed”): over 3 miles, someone walking takes far longer than someone driving.

3. 3

   Check the point and pick a spot

   You’ll see the fairest point with each person’s route and time, how long you’d take at the halfway point, and places to meet nearby, fairest first. Copy the link and send it to the others.

What it’s for

• Meeting halfway on a road trip

  If you live in different cities, a town halfway in time, not in miles, where neither of you drives much longer than the other.

• Coffee across town

  Three friends in different neighborhoods: the spot where nobody bikes or walks much longer than the rest, with cafés and bars around.

• One walking, one driving

  If one of you walks and the other drives, the fair point is much closer to the walker. Choose “Mixed” and set how each person travels.

• Handoffs and pickups

  For a Marketplace sale or a custody exchange, a spot halfway with a gas station or a restaurant to wait at.

How it’s calculated

Travel times come from OSRM, an open-source routing engine, on the OpenStreetMap road network, running on FOSSGIS’s public server (one of the engines behind directions on openstreetmap.org). First it tries over 40 spots spread between you: the straight-line midpoint (with three people, the center of the three), points along the line between you and a grid around them. For all of them at once it gets how long each person takes, each with their own travel mode.

Then it tries again around the best one with real places (the towns around if you’re far apart; cafés, bars, restaurants and parks if you’re close) and a finer grid. That’s about 80 spots in all. Finally it gets each person’s route to the chosen point, which is the one you see on the map and the one the numbers come from.

To choose, it first finds the least time the person with the longest trip could take. It rules out spots where that person would take more than 5% (or 2 minutes) longer than that, so you don’t end up somewhere everyone takes the same but far longer than needed. Of the rest, the winner is the one with the smallest gap between whoever takes longest and whoever takes least. If several have a similar gap (up to 5% of the trip or 1 minute more), the one with the least total time wins.

The places to meet come from the same OpenStreetMap data that draws the map (OpenFreeMap tiles). For each one it works out how long each person takes, and they’re sorted with the same rule as the point.

Why half the distance isn’t half the time

Roads don’t run in straight lines and they aren’t all equally fast. You can cruise at freeway speed on an interstate but crawl along a mountain road; getting out of a big city takes longer than crossing a small town; and a river, a mountain range or the sea forces a detour. That’s why the point at the same distance from two people is almost never the point at the same travel time.

Times Square in New York and City Hall in Philadelphia are 83.5 miles apart in a straight line. At the midpoint, in central New Jersey, the drive takes 1 h 14 min from New York and 1 h 10 min from Philadelphia. The meeting point comes out at a Dunkin’ in Cranbury, 4.6 miles away: 1 h 6 min from New York and 1 h 7 min from Philadelphia. Both of you drive less, and almost the same.

With different travel modes, the gap is huge. If one person walks from Millennium Park in Chicago and the other drives from Evanston, 11.7 miles apart in a straight line, at the halfway point the walker would take 2 h 15 min and the driver 14 minutes. The fair point is in River North, under a mile from the park: 25 minutes on foot and 24 by car.

Sometimes the middle already works: three friends driving from the Santa Monica Pier, Pasadena City Hall and downtown Long Beach would take 24, 24 and 26 minutes to the center of the three, and that’s the point the tool picks.

What it doesn’t account for

Times assume clear roads at each road’s normal speed: no traffic, lights, construction or time to park. At rush hour, whoever drives into or out of a big city will take longer than the map says.

It doesn’t include public transit (subway, bus or train): the free routing services it uses don’t have their schedules. By bike it assumes an ordinary bike on flat ground, about 9 mph (15 km/h), without hills, and on foot about 3 mph (5 km/h).

Ferries count only the crossing, with the duration listed in OpenStreetMap, without waiting or schedules. If one of you lives on an island, there may be no place where you’d take about the same: the tool tells you and shows the one with the smallest gap.

It uses free public services that ask for moderate use: FOSSGIS answers travel-time tables one at a time, every few seconds. That’s why the calculation takes 10 to 20 seconds (more with mixed travel modes); meanwhile you’ll see a first estimate.

The places to meet

They come from OpenStreetMap, the free map built by its users: cafés, restaurants, bars, parks, malls, gas stations (if someone drives) and, if you’re far apart, the towns around. Each one shows how long each person takes, a link to its OpenStreetMap page (with hours, website or phone if listed) and directions from each person.

If a place is missing or wrong, anyone can fix it on OpenStreetMap; the fix shows up here when the map is next updated.