Saving Highway Segment Files and Visualizing Them on a Map Application

[navigator]

Hi, I'm going to be driving on some roads that are new to me, and wish to follow along with something like G­o­ogle Maps (with its blue-circle-looking current location marker) especially for routes that may be tough to follow exactly, such as US Historic Highway old alignments.

Can individual highway files from TM be downloaded anywhere? And if so, is the file format readable by anything like G Maps or G Earth? It would make it pretty easy to know when I'm approaching a road that would count on the site.

The greatest thing would be if an app would look at the highway files with their many waypoints and give turn-by-turn directions to each point.

[Jim]

All of TM data is available on GitHub but the formats were built for TM (and previously CHM) tools. 

I think what you want is to bring up individual routes in the Highway Browser or in a regional mapview.  You can see the route(s) on Google Maps or other tile sets there and if I'm traveling somewhere new or just somewhere I've been but am interested in finding some new way to go, I'll often have the mapview for the region where I'm traveling displaying my current data loaded up on the iPad.

One thing we're missing, which I don't think is hard to add but I've just not had the time to investigate, is that blue location dot on TM's maps.  It's on the list.

I don't think you want to rely on just the TM data, now or in the future, for detailed directions.  TM's route data is intentionally relatively sparse.  Especially for a route that bounces around a few streets through a downtown area, we'd include only those that are major intersections plus any needed to keep the route's "line" reasonably close to the route.  There's also the issue that we typically split down the middle for routes that are a one-way pair through cities.  Our data also only has the route names/numbers we encode for the files, not street names.

[navigator]

I'm back from the first road trip in a while and am slowly adding what I drove as I get the time.

The blue dot seems like a helpful idea, especially for finding close routes with just a quick glance at the map. A wild idea I wish I could program is the ability to upload up to 10MB of KML/GPX or GPS track files to temporary/cloud storage (Google "MyMaps" allows just 5MB I believe, or 10 KML's uploaded onto a map). It makes recording and comparing all the routes much easier by uploading the tracks, but with the 5MB limit I need to instead use Google Earth if I take a long road trip with many recorded KML files (no size or file amount limit I've seen so far). The problem with Google Earth is that it's not as good to use for visualizing the track files -- Google Maps and Mapnik have a more pleasing visual layout, and their layers are here on TM.

Thanks for your continued work