Driving routes and time estimates - Google versus Michelin - preference?

Michelin has much more experience mapping Europe than does Google and several commenters on this forum have suggested adding some padding to the Google numbers. Maybe you're timing's not so tight that 5 vs 6 hours makes much difference.

P.S. viamichelin will estimate toll payments for the major roads in France and Italy, which I don't see on Google results.

We've relied on Via Michelin for France. You also get distances described in kilometers, just like on the signs, roads, and car odometers in France.

One vote for viamichelin against Google. It is designed for European roads. Viamichelin gives clearer maps than google, and gives distances and times. The times assume no stops, you need to add 10-25% depending on what rest stops you take.
It defaults to Km, but you can select miles if you prefer "Fred Flintstone units" :-).

Thanks! Sometimes, when driving, that last 5-10 minutes is the difference between sanity and insanity... I'll go with Michelin. The toll calculator will be helpful and I just found/downloaded an iphone app for the Michelin map.

I curse my non-metric upbringing fairly regularly. Kilometers aren't so bad for me, but trying to remember if 20C is pleasant weather or not leaves me stumped! I'm not sure how I got by pre-smartphone.

"I curse my non-metric upbringing fairly regularly. "

Don't worry about it. I have a technical education, and in the beginning the pure science guys (physics, chemistry) tried to convince us that intelligent life was impossible outside the metric (French) system. Then I got to the engineering disciplines that were in the American units, and I found that it makes little difference. Conversion factors are a fact of life in science (g=9.8 m/sec², not 10). And, if fact, 10 is not even a convenient number base. Why not use 8 or 16? We only use 10 because we have 10 fingers and learned to count on our fingers. (How scientific!)

20°C, BTW, is room temperature (68° in the American system, standard atmospheric condition). 0°C is freezing, 10°C is a cool day (50°F), 30°C is a warm day (86°F) and 40°C is really hot (104°F). Rick's memory crutch, 28°C is 82°F, a rather warm day in humid Germany.

It looks to me that both services are understating driving times. For example, I just tried to feed them with an actual itinerary I drive often - from an address in Florence to an address in Milan. Google says 2 h 52 min, but 3 h 1 min in present traffic; viamichelin says 3 h 20 min. Well, I managed to to do it in 3 h 10 min when driving on a Christmas morning (absolutely no traffic), but the average time is something like 3 h 20 min (on Sunday morning) to 3 h 40 min (on weekdays), let us say 4 hours with a stop, easily more if there are queues.

BTW: Google maps says it's 296 kms door to door, viamichelin says it's 294 kms, my personal measurement is 299 kms.

Lee
I will accept the statement that the decimal metric system, based on the number 10, is not convenient when at least 10% of the American population can correctly define an "acre".

An acre is a rectangular plot of land the size of 1 furlong (660 ft) long and 1 chain (66 ft) wide.

If then you can find 100 Americans who know that an acre is equal to 10 square chains, where a chain is 100 "links" long, which is equal to 4 "rods", or 22 yards. Or if you can find 10 Americans that know that an acre is equivalent to 160 perches, where a perch is equal to a square rod.

That day I will agree with you that the American system is more convenient than the metric system, where all you need to know is how to divide by 10 or multiply by 10.

Roberto & Lee

• A Hectare is a square 100 metres by 100 metres, so 100 hectares = 1000 metres by 1000 metres, that is 1 square Kilometre. I can envisage a Hectare, but not an acre.
• 1 Km is how far you can walk in ¼ hour.
• 20°C is room temperature, 25°C is a hot summer day (In England, only some summer days get this warm). 30°C is exceptionally hot in the UK, but a normal summer in Italy. 0°C is of course freezing.
• 1 Litre is a cube 10cm x 10cm x 10cm. 1 Litre of water weighs 1 Kg (= a supermarket carton of Orange Juice). 1000 Litres = 1 cubic metre = 1 tonne of water.
• And nobody (outside the USA) uses anything but metric for engineering

Easy.

So, Roberto, measuring system have three basic units, distance, mass, and time. That is, in the French systems there is the mks system -meters, kilograms, and seconds - or the cgs system - centimeters, grams, and seconds. Note, both use seconds.

How many seconds in a minute? 10? 100? No, 60!

How many minutes in an hour? 10? 100?, No, 60!

How many hours in a day? 10? 100? No, 24!

So your French system fails to use 10 in one of the 3 most basic measurements.

If we used a base 8 numbering system (instead of counting on our fingers), we could have 100 (ie 64 in base eight) seconds in a minute, 100 (64) minutes in an hour, 20 (16) hours in a day. That would make 65536 new seconds in a day vs the current 86400, an increase of only 32% for the second.

My point is that the French system is only slightly better than the American system, far from perfect. I'm not arguing for the American system, but for a new, intelligently designed system. We should throw out both systems, as well as our base 10 numbering system, and devise an entirely new, logical system, and everyone should switch to it.

By the way, in the French system, the meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000th (corrected from 100 millionth) of the distance from the north pole to the equator along the meridian that goes through Paris, France. Ever try to measure the distance from the north pole to the equator on any meridian (is that at high tide or low tide?)? Today it is 1/299,792,458th (there is a good even number for you) of the distance light travels per second in a vacuum.

And in the French system, standard gravitational acceleration is 9.8 m/sec² (what happened to 10?). In the new, intelligent system, the meter will be defined so that standard gravitational acceleration is 10 newm/newsec²), thus simplifying mass to weight calculations.

@ Lee
The best number base is of course 12. It is divisable by 2, 3, 4 and 6. When I was at school we had a system based on 12 - £sd.
12d (12 pence) = 1 shilling, 20 shillings = £1 (1 pound).
Simple, you could divide it by 2,3,4 or 6 in your head, and then they abolished it in favour of £1 = 100p.
So the obvious thing is to switch all arithmetic to a base of 12. :-).

The metre IS NOT 1/100,000,000th of the distance from the North Pole to the equator, you have 1 too many zeroes. The distance is 10,000 Km. That was the best accuracy they had at the time, but basing it on a physical distance is no longer accurate enough and better definitions are used.
You cannot use the value of gravity to define a unit because it is also a physical character, and it is different on different parts of the Earth's surface.

P.S. we are WAY off topic here.

If it is 10 million kilometres that's a pretty big world.

It is 10 million metres. Only 10,000 km.

Getting back on topic, I've been using ViaMichelin for a long time, before I knew about Google maps, so I tend to go there for distances because I'm more familiar with them. But I do use Google maps to find places on the map. The one difference I've noticed is that ViaMichelin shows more routes (recommended, shortest, fastest, most scenic, etc), which I don't think Google does.

BTW, years ago someone told me how to convert km to miles if you are driving in Europe and see a sign in km. Multiply by 5, divide by eight, and subtract 1. Why subtract 1? It took you about a mile to multiply by 5 and divide by eight.

And back off topic again-Roberto, you seem to think that we're too stupid to understand the metric system. We're not. I agree it's easy. What's not easy is converting what we usually use to metric, quickly, in a foreign language. If I see a sausage that I want sliced, at 20 euro per kilogram, I think, OK, so a kilo is about 2.2 lbs, so I guess that's about $10 a pound, so, that's all right, and I probably want about 1/4 lb, but we do have a lot of other stuff we've already bought, but it does look awfully good. So if I get about 200 grams that's probably about right, now in French, wait, why is she laughing at me? Oh, I said I wanted 200 kilograms, not grams.

To continue off topic . . . The problem with the metric system, for us Americans, is that having grown up with the English (?) system, we have no internalized sense of the order of magnitude of the metric units. The conversions are complicated; and to make matters worse, a kg is a lot more than a pound, whereas a km is a lot less than a mile. Those are the ones that tourists encounter most often. Temperature is easy. Double the celsius number and add 30. Close enough for helping you decide whether you need a sweater. A liter is quite close to a quart; 250 ml, about a cup. Unless you have some morbid fascination with how expensive gasoline is in Europe, it's irrelevant that prices are in euro/l. You have to fill up when the tank is empty. A liter of beer, on the other hand, is probably for more than one person.

It's not that hard really. 1/2 kg is close to 1 lb so 1 kg is a little more than 2 lb. If you're talking about how much you weigh, the little more/less could be significant, especially if your ego is involved :-) but if you're buying tomatoes, it's irrelevant. For short distances, again rough calculations are good enough. 2 km is about 1 mile. 500 meters is close to 500 yards. Okay, it's really 546 yards, but if someone tells you the Louvre is 500 meters up the road, do you care if it's 500 or 546 yards? Do you even know exactly how long 500 yards is?

If you're driving a rental car, the speedometer and odometer will be in km and so will the road signs.

@Karen, 200 grams is about ½ pound (0.44# or 7 oz.). (1 lb = 454.5 gm, 1 0z. = 28.4 gm)

You're right, Lee. And 200 kilo grams is way too much!

Converting measurements, money, and language all at the same time-gotta have a sense of humor about it.

I saw people mentioning Via Michelin often, and I want to alert fellow commentators that Via Michelin hasn't update its cartographic public online maps in a while. Many new roads, bypasses, highways that have opened since 2010 are simply missed by Via Michelin maps, even if their directions still show some of them.

I think Michelin tour guides/maps is suffering heavily from online competition, maybe they gave up on keeping a team to draw maps and update them; in any cases, travelers should be aware of the fact.

Thanks, Andre. Good to keep in mind.

Andre, thanks for the info! What mapping site do you use?

Screw all that metric stuff. I just know multiply kph time .6 and you've got mph.

And take liters of gasoline times 3.78 to come up with a U.S. Gallon. I can always tell you how much a U.S. gallon of gas costs in U.S. dollars at the day's Euro conversion amount. It's all relative in my mind to miles and gallons.

GoogleMaps and Mapquest are just guides. I've long ago learned to not take them for the gospel, but more as a guide. Sometimes they're accurate and sometimes they're not. Same with the times.

I'm still in awe how you can go on GoogleMaps.com and hit the + a couple of times to magnify the map..And hotels and bed and breakfasts pop up everywhere you go--and links to their direct websites can be quickly used.