Scenic Route Option on Maps

h a l f b a k e r y

Outside the bag the box came in.

add, search, annotate, link, view, overview, recent, by name, random

news, help, about, links, report a problem

browse anonymously, or get an account and write.

There's more to life than "fastest" and "shortest".

(+2)

On a recent long drive up to New Hampshire, Google maps suggested a couple of routes, the fastest spending most of the time on i-95 avoiding some of the country's more psychopathic drivers, a lightly shorter route through more rural areas, but still plunging right through the NYC traffic hellscape. Neither really appealed.

Planning my own route I got to go along the shores of 3 lakes, plan stops in places that were nice, avoid tolls, traffic and rest stop price gouging.

Let's have a scenic route option please. There's many indicators - state parks, lookouts etc. Should be simple.

Top hit (after the LLM answer) for google search for "scenic route option" https://www.myscenicdrives.com/
[normzone, Jul 16 2026]

[+] but they gotta have something like this already no?

There are apps for Blue Road tourism and there are many, some for sights, some for food, some for fish, some for company. Your pref?

Inventions Ideas for inventions for the halfbakery should be original to the poster and should, as far as the poster knows, not exist already. (Use search engines to check whether or not what you're about to invent already exists.)

Similar to my ideas for routing options prioritizing cellphone signal availability and walking directions prioritizing shade. I like it [+]

Just go to "add stops" and add as many intermediate places as you need to, to force the stupid machine to take a route you want.

Or alternatively just turn when the scenery looks pretty and ignore the machine for a while (the idiot machine seems wise to this though and will direct you back to the dull motorway as soon as it can)

I think that ignoring the machine and turning onto a slower but more scenic route affects it, it seems to learn from your driving style. After I have been doing a lot of off-piste scenic detours it starts to offer me more alternative routes, though some are stupid.

I would also like the option of interesting driving roads, these are often, but not always also scenic. Maybe it should also factor in the type of car you're in/number/type of passengers? When I visit my brother later in the year the same destination might be reached by a: huge Mercedes v-class* b: Jag XJR c: 1995 Renault Clio Williams with a spicy cam and some intake/exhaust work. Here all the calculations change: The van is a heavy affront to aerodynamics and so with drag scaling to the cube of speed, if fuel economy is considered, average speed and stop/starts should be kept low. The Jag is at home at modestly supra-legal motorway speeds - while the Clio would be a horrible place to be sat on the motorway. It was bought to be hustled through twisty B-roads through the Pennines, although that fun is being slowly strangled.

*for transporting many children without the inconvenience of having to fold anything.

One to minimise the distance between publicly accessible loos please.