Trip planner now available on CNGPrices.com

[cngprices]

Hi everyone!

I've been working hard the last month or so putting together a trip planner on the CNG Prices web site. Just put in where you are starting from and where you are going to and CNG Prices will print out a map and list of stations that are within about 30 miles of your route (it will not print out ALL the stations - this is on purpose - it just prints enough to get you where you need to go (if possible!). The feature is almost ready for prime time, but I wanted to give CNGChatters a chance to look at it now, use it and give me any feedback that you might have - this community has been wonderful in giving me feedback on my site.

At the moment, you can only get to the trip planner by clicking on this link, because it is not linked from the main page.

Please let me know what you think, and if there are any improvements to be made. If all goes well, I'll probably roll it out officially next week. The one feature that isn't there yet, but I will be working on shortly is multiple way points. Right now you can only go from A to B, but soon I'll add A to B to C to D, etc. I'm actively working on it, so there may be a hiatus or two while I upgrade features, but it should work if people want to try it. You can leave me feedback here, PM me or use the contact link on the CNGPrices web page.

Cheers,
Todd

[j03j03]

Re: Trip planner now available on CNGPrices.com

You have great timing! I'll be putting it to the test this weekend. I'm heading out to Cali for a few days. Leaving from Logan UT so i'll let you know how it works!

[Blueflame]

Re: Trip planner now available on CNGPrices.com

Very nice! I like how you include the price, phone# and type of payment along with the address and directions. Knowing the max distance between stations is also very helpful.
Are GPS locations available for the stations that could be included? Possibly the the names of the two stations that have the greatest distance between them with no services in between?
This is a great idea. I can see this being very useful. Thanks for all your hard work!

[hansonc]

Re: Trip planner now available on CNGPrices.com

You should include the start and end points in the maximum distance calculation. As of now, if you drive from a point where there are stations to a point where there are none there are no indications that there might be a problem.

as an example I tried Park City to Wendover, knowing there are no CNG stations anywhere near Wendover and it tells me that the CNG stations are 26 miles apart, completely ignoring the fact that you might be able to get to Wendover but you might not be getting back on CNG :-)

[Convert2CNG]

Re: Trip planner now available on CNGPrices.com

Great tool.
do you plan to also include the feature to drag the route to a different path?
i.e. when doing a google 'get direction' and the path in shown in purple, you can move your mouse over the path, which brings up a small circle, which you can drag onto a different street (as a detour) and the new path is calculated.

[John Mitton]

Re: Trip planner now available on CNGPrices.com

Todd,

Once again you exceed our expectations
You probably already are aware of the POS data we have been gathering, so having this listed for each station would be great (I suppose folks could post these coordinates in the Comments area now?).
http://www.cngchat.com/forum/showthread.php?t=870

I also echo the comment that showing the miles between each station would be very helpful in in addition to the max distance number you already provide.

[cngprices]

Re: Trip planner now available on CNGPrices.com

Thanks everyone for your feedback so far. It's appreciated! I'll work on some of the things you've mentioned.

do you plan to also include the feature to drag the route to a different path?

Right now that would be hard since Google does not give web site developers access to that part of their service. If they added it, then it should be easy to add it to the site, but until that time, it would be a very difficult task. The interim solution is to use multiple way-points. So if you wanted to go from San Diego to San Francisco, but needed to be on the coast, you might put in San Diego -> San Luis Obispo -> San Francisco (once I add the feature for multiple way points)

Cheers,
Todd

[ajgiorgi]

Re: Trip planner now available on CNGPrices.com

Good Stuff!

[cnguser]

Re: Trip planner now available on CNGPrices.com

Todd
Great tool! Not sure if this has been mentioned but it needs to have the actual road mileage (as used on MAPQUEST) between 2 locations - not aerial distance as the crow flies. I found this when trying it.
THANKS!

[cngprices]

Re: Trip planner now available on CNGPrices.com

Great tool! Not sure if this has been mentioned but it needs to have the actual road mileage (as used on MAPQUEST) between 2 locations - not aerial distance as the crow flies.

CNGUser -

That would prove difficult to do. In order to get actual road mileage, I would have to ask Google for directions from one station to the other, for every station. In some trips, there might be 50 stations listed, which would mean that I have to ask Google for 50 different sets of directions. This has two problems. The first is that asking for 50 different sets of directions would take a long time. The second is that Google limits the number of times a web site can ask for directions in a day before they charge you lots of money. It's a fairly high limit, but if I had to get 50 sets of directions every time someone got directions, it could cause all of my maps to not work if enough people got directions in a day.

On the other hand, calculating "as the crow flies" distances is very easy and fast, which is why I do it that way. Perhaps as a compromise I could add a link after the distance that would allow you to get directions and actual distance between any two stations. This would mean that the actual distance is only calculated "on demand". Would that work?

Cheers,
Todd

[bakaroma]

Re: Trip planner now available on CNGPrices.com

I really want to make it to Denver with my Civic. Does anybody know how reliable the Rock Springs and Cheyenne pumps have been?

[jetboatjohnny]

Re: Trip planner now available on CNGPrices.com

I know this is off topic, but can anyone tell me how I can use the cngprices.com on a dialup connection?
For some reason I cant get a map to come up.

[cngprices]

Re: Trip planner now available on CNGPrices.com

I know this is off topic, but can anyone tell me how I can use the cngprices.com on a dialup connection?
For some reason I cant get a map to come up.

I know of no technical reason that the map shouldn't come up. Are you able to get regular Google maps to come up OK? Over a dial up connection everything is going to be rather slow since there is a lot of data being transferred to get all of the station information on there.

On my to-do list which gets longer and longer no matter how much I work on it, is a lower bandwidth version of the site that will give you a static map. However, since Google doesn't allow this in their terms of service, it's a task that has been put off a number of times. =) But if anyone has experience doing google maps for mobile, by all means PM me!

Cheers,
Todd

[jetboatjohnny]

Re: Trip planner now available on CNGPrices.com

Todd, Thanks for the quick reply. I've had some other issues with my home computer, maybe it's something else. I guess I could try a different browser like IE or Firefox, I'm using Opera. Anyway I guess you got the message about my station being back in operation, I hate to see it in black! See you again at the cruise in.

[Curtis]

Re: Trip planner now available on CNGPrices.com

John, time to upgrade the old 486mhz with the 14.2 modem...
Try going to the site and walk away from the computer for a while. Takes a few to load the maps on my dial up when I have a good connection speed. Try adding some memory to speed it up overall.