Longest Distance – Simplest Directions

It’s Sunday, a day to relax, so I thought I’d dispense with an article that required actual research. Instead I’ll focus on something that might exercise a different part of the brain. It’s kind-of silly and pointless although it offered an opportunity for plenty of 12MC audience participation.

I wondered, as I drove to my destination, about the longest distance I could drive without a GPS talking to me. For some of you that would be infinite because you don’t use a GPS on principal, and I respect that. I still find the device useful as a companion to a range of the other tools including my own common sense. For those who choose to use a GPS then, about how long could one drive without hearing a single voice command? I know I’ve seen instructions that said something like “continue on Route XYZ” for greater than a hundred miles on my various road trips. That can’t be the longest.


The Rules

Obviously I don’t have the time, energy or inclination to test a solution in the wild. So I decided to use Google Maps as a handy a proxy instead. The rules are simple. In fact, there’s only one rule: the written directions must have a single command equivalent to keep on truckin’.

Crossing into Montana from Wyoming on the road to Alzada. Photo by howderfamily.com; (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Crazy Distances

Point your vehicle, don’t turn, don’t deviate, don’t stop, don’t bear right or left, don’t drive aboard a ferry, don’t negotiate a roundabout. Just continue to follow the single line of instruction.


The Results

Google Maps reserved its craziest distances for the United States. I didn’t know if that was a Google thing or if it was a characteristic of the U.S. interstate highway system of very well-developed motorways through extremely depopulated areas. Interstate 40 turned out to be the grand champion for a segment between Barstow, California and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

Here were the complete Google driving instructions:

  • 1. Head east on I-40

That’s all. For 1,215 miles — 1,953 kilometres (¹), head east. Well, it also noted helpfully that one would pass through Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas before entering Oklahoma. However that didn’t change the basic premise. Assuming one never had to stop for gasoline, or rest for a biological imperative, the GPS unit would remain silent for more than twelve hundred miles. That’s nearly nineteen hours at normal highway speeds. Theoretically.

There were numerous extreme occurrences in the United States with a single written instruction provided in Google Maps. All of them were longer than 621 miles — 1,000 kilometres. The segments are a bit of a pain to isolate so you can either take my word for it or go into Google Maps and tease them out yourself. Remember, Google seems to offer slightly different results to different people. It also changes conclusions over time so your results may vary.

  • I-40: 1,215 miles (1,953 km)
  • I-90: 1,135 miles (1,827 km)
  • I-70: 1,105 miles (1,778 km)
  • I-80: 1,053 miles (1,695 km)
  • I-10: 974 miles (1,568 km)
  • I-5: 855 miles (1,376 km)
  • I-90 + I-94: 824 miles (1,326 km) followed by 823 miles (1,325 km)
  • I-94: 824 miles (1,326 km)
  • I-81: 682 miles (1,098 km)
  • I-26: 649 miles (1,044 km)
  • I-15: 647 miles (1,041 km)

The Interstate 90 and Interstate 94 discovery was particularly interesting, with back-to-back 800+ mile segments. It would have stretched 1,647 miles (2,651 km) if it weren’t for an instruction to “keep left to continue on I-94 E” outside of Billings, Montana. That last item brought up a good point. I’ve only checked these distances going in one direction, generally west to east or north to south. Distances could vary if one flipped directions. I’ll leave those stones to be overturned by the 12MC audience. Maybe someone will discover a result that blows my findings out of the water.


Russia

I figured, the larger the nation the greater the probability of a single road stretching the farthest, right? What better place to start than Russia? The best example I uncovered occurred between Chita, Zabaykalsky Krai and Uglegorsk, Amur Oblast. It happened on Highway M58, a part of the Trans-Siberian Highway.

  • 1. Head east on Amyp/M58. Continue to follow M58

That was the single line of driving instruction for a distance of 1,337 kilometres (831 miles). It seemed like a glitch, though. Why would Google specify an odd rectangular gyration on an otherwise clear stretch of road that would require one to turn at Uglegorsk?

I had to turn to Yandex for a decent satellite image. Further research indicated that Uglegorsk was a closed urban settlement originally constructed to serve a nearby base for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. It’s also the future site of the Vostochny Cosmodrome, now under construction. So that would create a very obvious checkpoint on the M58 highway.

Russian route M58, the Amur Highway, would continue uninterrupted for another 754 kilometres (469 mi) without the unusual detour at Uglegorsk, and the combined length would become 2,091 kilometres (1,300 mi). That would make it longer than the I-40 stretch in the United States. I’ll assume that the Russian space program is slightly more important than the nation being crowned a grand champion of silent GPS driving distances.

An interesting bit of trivia about M58; it wasn’t completed until 2010. As noted in the St. Petersburg Times,

“It is the last link in a road system that stretches from Murmansk, north of the Arctic Circle on the Barents Sea, and Kaliningrad, on the border with Poland, to Vladivostok, on the Pacific Ocean… Services — filling stations, hotels and auto repair shops — are rare on the highway, and lengthy sections do not have access to electricity.”


Australia

I turned to another large nation with wide open spaces for the next example and found a decent example on Australia’s Great Northern Highway.

  • 1. Head north-east on Great Northern Hwy/National Highway 95. Continue to follow Great Northern Hwy
Australia has some amazing road distances. Copyright image used with permission.
Amazing Road Distances

The directions continued that way for another 1,323 kilometres (822 mi) through Western Australia, from Wubin to an intersection with the North West Coastal Highway south of Port Hedland, near the Indian Ocean coastline. I knew that Australia had some amazing road distances so I wasn’t surprised at all by this result.


Other Contenders

My unscientific examination of other nations yielded additional single instruction driving distances extending more than a thousand kilometres.

  • Canada’s Trans-Canada Highway: 1,301 kilometres (808 mi)
  • China’s G45: 1,078 kilometres (670 mi)
  • Algeria’s N1: 1,044 kilometres (649 mi)

Feel free to try different locations, or flip-flop directions, or use other online map sites.


Completely Unrelated

Here we go again, facing a U.S. government shutdown because of political failures to approve a budget. I reviewed what I wrote in March 2011, Tourist Options During a Government Shutdown, and found it to be up-to-date for the most part. Sadly, baseball won’t be an option in Washington this October. However I’m sure there are plenty of other recreational or entertainment possibilities.


(¹) I’ll reference miles first for distances in the United States since that’s the measure used there, and flip to kilometres for locations where that’s the standard. As I’ve noted before, I don’t know why the U.S. won’t switch to the metric system. No and I don’t understand why the U.S continues to have a unit of currency that’s one-hundredth of a dollar either. What can I say?

Comments

8 responses to “Longest Distance – Simplest Directions”

  1. The Basement Geographer : Avatar

    Sitting in line for a ferry, I quickly dumped in the Alaska Highway heading northwest from Dawson Creek, BC and got 1,557 km (967 mi), ending at the three-way junction at Haines Junction, Yukon; I imagine that would be tough to beat for Canada. I wonder what the longest directions through the Sahara, western China, or the Amazon would be?

  2. January First-of-May Avatar
    January First-of-May

    There’s a bigger Russian distance of 1599 km (~994 mi), between, roughly, Khandyga and Magadan: http://goo.gl/maps/NWP05
    (the linked route is actually a double-stretch path starting near Skovorodino – would’ve been over 3000 km, but there’s a ferry in Khandyga across the unbridged Aldan river; the piece before the ferry is 1482 km).

  3. Kevin K Avatar
    Kevin K

    A reversal of I-40(from Wilmington, NC to Barstow, CA) gives you 1547 miles from Little Rock, AR to Barstow.

  4. Colin Avatar
    Colin

    There is a longer stretch in Australia of 1470km, from Alice Springs to Darwin: http://goo.gl/maps/exXpz
    From Adelaide to Darwin, you go on a stretch of road 2690km long with a roundabout in the middle: http://goo.gl/maps/KYl9d

    It is unfortunate how many long stretches of road are split with such non-directions as “continue onto…” or “keep right to continue on…”

    1. Twelve Mile Circle Avatar

      Curses Alice Springs and her insignificant roundabout!

  5. hipsterdoofus Avatar
    hipsterdoofus

    It is kind of odd that the reversal is different through Oklahoma City. In both cases you have to deal with I-35, and the interchanges are not vastly different from one direction to another as far as level of difficulty.

  6. Rhodent Avatar
    Rhodent

    Remember when it used to be that you could get directions between somewhere in North America and somewhere in Europe, and the directions would send you to Boston, tell you to swim across the Atlantic to England, and give directions from there? It’s obviously not within the spirit of this game and no longer on Google Maps anyway, but for curiosity’s sake I checked and found that the distance you were told to swim was 3,462 miles. I doubt that Google Maps ever has or ever will given directions that were longer than that.

  7. David Avatar
    David

    What I find amusing is when you pull off the highway for a break in some podunk town during a long road trip, and if the highway is that town’s main drag, when you resume the trip, the GPS might say something like “Continue for 180 miles on Main Street.” Even though the street name according to the GPS changes back to a numbered route past the city limits. This happened to me on Highway 101 somewhere south of the redwoods in far Northern California.

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